


The Ghosts that Find Us

by palavapeite



Category: Black Widow (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Comic Book Science, Comic-typical violence, F/M, Gen, Natasha Needs a Hug, Natasha-centric, Nightmares, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), investigating the Winter Soldier, mentions of brainwashing and torture, mixing of comic and MCU canon, spoilers not mentioned in tags (check the notes at the end)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-27
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-06-04 19:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 47,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6673438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palavapeite/pseuds/palavapeite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one’s seen the Winter Soldier since the Helicarriers went down into the Potomac. Until he shows up one night and asks for her help. </p><p>Natasha doesn’t know where exactly his nightmares will take her, or what she will find on the other side, but she says yes anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Shadow Woman

**Author's Note:**

> Canon-compliant until Age of Ultron; does not take into account any movies thereafter (including trailers for Civil War), Agents of SHIELD, or Agent Carter season 2. Edit: To my utter delight, though, it remains canon-compliant even after Civil War. Yay! 
> 
> Alternative crack titles for this story are "Eurovision Bomb Contest" and "[Frozen to Lose it all](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imqkO0lK9yg/)".

There was a stain that wouldn’t come off. 

“I swear, you’re so overthinking this. They’re highlights. They’ll grow out sooner than you’ll want them to anyway.” 

Holly’s reflection in the chrome espresso machine contorted into a grimace and her eyes darted away from the splotch of burnt and dried coffee to the brown bangs that fell just to her eyebrows, streaked with honey blonde and warped out of shape by the curved surface. 

“And also - Alessandro _really_ likes them,” Chantelle continued and a groan burst out of Holly’s mouth as she straightened up and turned around to look at the other barista, who was grinning, only barely escaping the slap Holly dealt her with the cleaning rag in her hand. 

The few guests that were still around fifteen minutes before closing time were either too busy talking, or too focused on their phones to pay attention to the giggles coming from the bar. Holly sighed, and watched a group of college kids leave and barely avoid bumping into a disgruntled-looking man walking past on the dark sidewalk. 

“ _’Olly_ ,” Chantelle mimicked the owner’s accent, attracting Holly’s attention by gesticulating urgently with her hands, “Your ‘air looks-ah like carrramel in a darrrk, intense cup-ah of _espresso_ …”

The business woman in the corner of the small coffee shop bent the corner of her giant newspaper down to shoot a bewildered look at the bar and Holly had to turn her face away when she noticed. Chantelle bit her lip and leaned in closer, whispering passionately.

“And your eyes, ‘Olly. Like-ah the darrrkest-ah _cioccolata_ I ‘ave-ah ever tasted…” 

“Oh my God, Chantelle, shut up before we get fired,” Holly managed to press out between gritted teeth, giggling and finally blushing furiously when the women from the corner suddenly put her empty cup onto the counter, newspaper rolled up under her arm and leather suitcase in hand. There was a sharpness to the amusement in her green eyes when she turned to leave, her blonde hair falling to the middle of her back. 

“Thank you,” Holly called after her, collecting her wits and fussing with her apron. “Have a good night and come again!” 

“You know, I’m pretty sure she liked your hair too,” Chantelle said casually when they had cleared the last of the tables half an hour later. 

“Now you’re fishing.” 

It was dark, and the streets were wet when Holly walked home, shoulders pulled up and hands in her pockets, clasping her keys and phone. She kept looking ahead, and only had to stop for red lights twice. Shadows passed her by unacknowledged, and melted into the blackness of night when she opened the door to her building and switched on the lights in the staircase. 

Her apartment was on the second floor, lights flicking on as she made her way from one room to the next. Her silhouette was visible briefly against the white of the curtains before she let down the blinds. 

The man on the opposite side of the street slid out of the dark doorway he’d been hiding in and hurried to disappear into the closest alley. 

 

It was a busy afternoon, Carl was late for his evening shift, and Holly was drumming her fingers on the counter impatiently as she waited for the milk to foam, eyes darting to the door every time the bell above rung to announce a new visitor. None of the people who’d come in in the last twenty minutes had been Carl, and there was a line of at least ten people that didn’t seem to want to get shorter. 

“There you are. Thank you,” she smiled at a mother as she handed her a cappuccino and a hot chocolate for her pre-pubescent daughter, throwing the tip into the jar. 

The bell above the door was audible again and two hipsters entered the coffee shop, followed by a familiar face, blonde hair falling loose down her shoulders. Holly wiped the hair out of her forehead with the back of her arm, trying to open a milk carton and press buttons on the machine at the same time. 

Three cappuccinos, a hot chocolate with a caramel shot, a double shot and a chai latte, an espresso, a double espresso, and a decaf soy milk latte later, Holly slid a skim milk latte without milk foam across the counter at the last customer in line. 

“I’m that predictable, huh? Predictable is bad, I should really change that. Or get my Nespresso machine fixed,” the blonde woman said with amusement in her voice when she put her phone away and stepped up to the counter. She wrapped her fingers around the cup, her regular order, shaking her head in disbelief. Holly just shrugged, smirking slightly. 

“You look like you’re having a busy day,” she replied and the woman huffed, pulling money from her pocket. Her phone was already buzzing again. 

“I have more sisters than most people probably think is healthy, and somehow I’m still managing to get cancelled on by every single one of them tonight.” She hesitated for a moment, hand hovering as she offered a ten dollar bill. “How much for extra whipped cream and a slice of cheesecake?” 

The door rang again and Holly could see Carl dashing into the shop with an extremely sorry look on his face, while she put a slice of cake onto a plate. He was binding his apron around his waist and muttering excuses by the time Holly added whipped cream to the coffee and gave the woman her change. 

“Keep it,” the woman said, smiling and pocketing her phone, which had buzzed twice again in the meantime. 

Carl was busy with the next wave of customers when Holly came back out of the staff room, messenger bag slung over her shoulder, and made herself a cup of coffee to go. This was one thing Alessandro wasn’t picky about. 

“Hey, wait!” 

Barely out of the coffee shop, Holly turned around and looked at the blonde woman, who was hurrying after her, coat and bag still inside at her table. 

“I’m Carmen,” she offered, holding out her hand. “This is only a little awkward. You got any plans for tonight?” 

 

“No, no sisters,” Holly laughed as they walked down the street away from the theatre. “Just a tragedy of a brother who hasn’t called me back in weeks.”

“Not the type to take you to Swan Lake, then?” 

“No,” Holly chuckled and they crossed the street in silence. “I’m not sure I ever went to see the ballet before,” she added with a glance at Carmen beside her. “It was really interesting. Thank you.” 

“I must’ve seen it twenty, thirty times,” Carmen replied, looking embarrassed, and added, by way of explanation, “Ballet classes when I was a kid. It warps your idea of fun.” 

Holly laughed in surprise and looked Carmen up and down when she stopped them by a hot dog vendor with an apologetic face and a wink. She was taller than Holly, if not by much, and slender and graceful in her grey slacks and light coat. She could have been a ballerina. 

“Why did you stop? Did you stop?” She shook her head when the vendor asked if she wanted anything.

“Didn’t really have a choice,” Carmen said between bites as they walked on. “Just life, you know? Other things you need to do, and the ballet doesn’t like it if you need too much time for the real world. In the end you kinda have to decide who’s going to be in charge of your life.” She took another bite out of the hot dog, and mustard squirted out onto her fingers. Trying to suck it off, she added, mouth full and chewing, gesturing with the food in her hand, “These are just an extra bonus.” 

Holly’s smile in reply lasted until they had reached the subway, and their paths finally split. 

“I had a really nice time,” Holly said, leaning in for a peck on each cheek. “Thank you for the invitation.” 

“No, thank you,” Carmen squeezed her arms as they parted. “It was so very nice of you to come. We should do that again sometime. I mean, if you want.”

“I do,” Holly smiled, a little bashfully. “Maybe I’ll show you how the other half grew up.”

“I think I’d like that.” They stood close, and Carmen seemed to realise it suddenly, and took a small step back. “I will see you soon, I expect?”

“As long as you don’t get that Nespresso machine fixed,” Holly laughed, and waved back as she crossed the street, while Carmen descended the stairs to the subway. 

Holly stopped only briefly at a garishly lit and somewhat dodgy shop on the way home, for a pack of milk and dishwashing agent. There was a missed call on her phone and she decided to answer it in the morning as she walked up to her apartment building, a light skip in her step. She was humming a melody from the ballet that was stuck in her head.

Her silhouette was visible in the rectangular shape of light that fell through her bathroom window out onto the street as she took off her blouse and bra, and turned on the shower. She was about to step in when, like an afterthought, she let down the blinds and shut the world out. 

The man in the shadows outside her house waited another minute, two, three, four, five, then glanced up and down the deserted street, and moved out of his hiding place on the corner to a small nearby alley. He stepped carefully over the broken glass that lay shattered around the dumpsters beside which he’d crouched, and his hand hovered close to his belt.

“Nuh-uh,” a voice tutted above him, and he froze when he heard the click of a gun. He exhaled slowly, raising his arms. He didn’t need to look up. 

“I’ve been looking for you,” he pressed out when a pair of feet softly touched the ground behind him. The fire escape above them barely creaked. “I need to talk to you.”

“You better,” she said. “You’re not particularly subtle. And the people tailing you aren’t either.” 

He turned his head just a little and could only just make out her shape in the darkness of the small back alley. The gun in her hand was well aimed right between his eyes. 

“I don’t know who they are,” he admitted, slowly turning around, hands moving behind his head. “Could be the same ones that’re tailing you.” 

“Well, I’ll have to assume my cover is blown now, then- _Ah!_ Where I can see them,” she said, cocking her head just a little, and he complied, moving his hands apart again. Her face betrayed no surprise at his comment about her tail. The highlighted strands of hair that fell into her forehead were damp and beginning to curl. She still wore the same skirt she’d worn to the ballet, the same dainty, flat shoes that were nowhere near fancy enough, but the best she’d had. 

He visibly struggled to hold her gaze, intense even in the darkness of the alley, and took a deep breath. He had prepared for this moment, he’d played it all out in his head, over and over. He could do this. 

 

When she came back to the flat, she turned the shower off before slipping out of her jacket, shirt and skirt and slumping down on the toilet. The bathroom was steamed up and she looked at the prints her feet had left on the tiles while grabbing for her jacket and digging in its right front pocket for the folded sheets of paper he’d shoved into her hands before disappearing. 

“I have to ask for something,” he’d said. “I read what you did. What you can do. I need your help.”

_Operation Winterschlaf_ , the piece of paper read, followed by what looked like coordinates in a familiar encryption. The back of the paper had print on it, a page ripped out of a book, a library book judging by the stamp in the top corner. _Property of Williston Community Library_. 

It could be nothing, she mused, standing and stretching her shoulders before leaning over the sink and splashing water into her face and thinking of the few words he’d used to explain himself. Coming from him? 

It was barely information, two words and a set of coordinates that haunted his nightmares. He’d mentioned the smell of smoke, high mountains, and blond hair brushing against his face. 

Half of it might have been memories from way before, the blond hair might have been Steve’s for all she knew. Was there anything in the nightmares and waking terrors of a brainwashed assassin that could be taken seriously? 

Remembering her own, she wondered whether there there was anything that couldn’t. 

On the floor, in a different jacket pocket, her phone buzzed. 

“ _H- oh, hi_ ,” Carmen’s voice said after she’d picked up, a little hesitantly, but there was sincerity to it. “ _Uh, I hope you got home okay. I just got in and... I just wanted to say thanks again for coming with me tonight._ ” 

“I had a really great time.” It wasn’t a lie. “We should go when another one’s in town.”

There was a small pause and Carmen’s blush was audible in her voice. 

“ _Yeah! I... yeah, we definitely should._ ” She paused. “ _Listen, I’m gonna have to knuckle down at work for the next week or so, and then I’ll be out of town for some family drama, but end of next month some friends and I are having dinner at the Praying Mantis. And uh..._ ” she laughed, a little awkwardly. “ _Super hip place, I guess, I don’t know, it’s somewhere down by the river, but if you want to join us, I’d... you know, I’d really like that. I mean, if you want to. You can bring someone if you like?_ ”

Holly smiled, and there was a sting of wistfulness in her voice.

“Sounds lovely. I’d like that.”

“ _Great!_ ” Carmen sounded relieved. “ _So I’ll be in touch? Maybe I’ll manage to drop by the coffee shop once or twice, despite work..._ ”

“Your coffee will be waiting. Unless you change your order.”

“ _So tempting_ ,” Carmen laughed, then took a breath. “ _Well, I won’t keep you up, right, you have work and all... just, uh, thanks. And goodnight!_ ” 

“Goodnight! Sleep well!” 

“ _You too!_ ” 

 

She didn’t sleep well. In her dreams, she was garrotting the Winter Soldier, only to find out that the man collapsing under her wasn’t him at all, but that he had been right behind her all the time, watching, and she was staring at a corpse trying to reason that maybe she hadn’t killed him and that people survived being garrotted all the time, then remembered she’d meant to be somewhere else, and was running out of time...

The garish light of the early morning found her back in front of the bathroom mirror with cold sweat down her back, and cool drops of water dripping off the tip of her nose. 

Outside in the living room, her laptop screen was glowing dully in the dark, all search results coming up empty. There was no record of Operation Winterschlaf in any HYDRA or SHIELD files, and no files that matched the coordinates he’d given her by as much as a hundred mile radius. Of all the alleged appearances and operations involving the Winter Soldier, none showed any connection to what he seemed to be remembering in his nightmares.

Staring at her feet, she tried to tune out his voice echoing in her head. 

She should call it in, a voice of reason spoke softly. Whatever it was, it wasn’t for her to find or solve, not really. 

She turned her phone over in her hand and started dialling a number. The alarm was going to ring in an hour, she had the early shift. 

“Maria,” she said when her call was picked up. “Something’s come up.” Her eyes found her own in the mirror for a moment before she looked back to the pieces of paper that she’d left on the toilet. “No progress on your case, sorry. Listen...” 

_What about Steve?_ It was just the flash of a thought. What about Steve?

“I’m going to need a rain check on this op. I can’t tell you why or how long it’ll take me.” 

It might be easier to get across the Pacific if she told Steve, asked him to join her. They’d take the jet, figure out what to do once they touched down... He’d want to be in on this, she was dead certain. 

“No, it’s fine. I’ll tell him myself. Thanks, Maria. All right. I’ll see you.” 

She ran a hand through her hair, phone still in hand. He’d told her, the Winter Soldier, that he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what lay on the other end of his dreamscapes. She wondered then, whether the real nightmare would be not to find anything. But whatever it was going to be...

She opened a new text message.

_steve, need to go off the grid. will be in touch. make sure sam runs his rounds ;-) xxx_

She put her phone down and took a long, last glance at Holly Fletcher in the looking glass before pulling the wig off her head. The hairline underneath framed a different woman’s face now, red curls greased back and pulled together tightly at the back of her head. 

Like a ballerina.


	2. The Wall of Lovers

The wind was uncomfortable, and the windows of her borrowed car didn’t close properly all the way. When she finally reached her destination and stepped out onto the hard ground, she tucked up the collar of her coat before closing the car door. The place was deserted, a single derelict building, as if left to be forgotten at the doors of Tian Shan, not another sign of life in sight as far as the eye reached. 

“ _Are you sure you want to do this?_ ” Clint had asked when she’d called him from Anchorage, just before she’d dropped Holly’s phone into a tub of acid and erased the final, last remnant of her existence. “ _Cause it sounds like a crazy wild goose chase. If the goose had a metal arm and a lot of guns and could potentially be chasing you instead._ ” 

“Can’t really say you’re wrong,” she muttered to herself now as she approached the derelict building fading into the scenery. Her Stark-issued superhero phone didn’t pick up signs of life. 

The Kazakhian outback. If she’d decoded the coordinates right. Which she might not have, considering it seemed to be a place of zero interest to anyone, but it was perhaps exactly that that made it seem worth a try. 

Though just because there was a building didn’t mean she’d find anything here. 

At which point had Clint become the sensible one of the two of them?

She hardly knew what she was even looking for; it wasn’t like Barnes had known, or dared to tell her. But if there was even a hint of the Winter Soldier programme somewhere in the world other than inside the heads of dead men, then it was worth finding. Because the Avengers hadn’t found anything, nothing at all. James Barnes was the last ghost of HYDRA that none of their searches, raids and takedowns had been able to raise from the grave. Dozens of HYDRA bases around the world while chasing the scepter, and Steve was no closer to tracing the Winter Soldier back to the man he’d once been than before. 

Why Barnes would have memories of this place she couldn’t say, carefully stepping into the building, main door stiff in its hinges, and remains of wooden flooring creaking under her feet. The building seemed emptied, deserted, and not anytime as recent as the past two or three decades. Nothing had flagged up in her search on this place, no HYDRA activity, no newsworthy events, nothing. She walked past the remains of a wooden staircase into a corridor, lined with doors that led into large rooms. 

No massacres, either. None, at least, that anyone had ever found out from the other side of the Iron Curtain. 

The building was large, set out like a hospital, or perhaps a boarding school at the edge of the world. A prison. 

Not a prison, she decided, looking at the open, unbarred windows, and the doors that seemed to have no locks on them. There were dirt stains on the walls, like ghostly shadows around furniture that had stood there a long time ago. It was all gone now, and the pictures she took with her phone as she walked through were of the skeleton of a house, of dust and mould and faded paint. 

She decided against trying the stairs and pulled herself up to the upper floor by cracks and holes in the wall. It was darker than the ground floor, the windows smaller. She found a layout of dormitories, two on opposite sides of the building. No bedframes, but an old spring and some drill holes in the floor where bedposts would have been secured. The scanner built into her phone estimated that the place had been in decay for forty to fifty years, judging by the state of the walls and floor. 

The smell of death that hung about the building didn’t strike her until she stepped back outside, putting away her phone and taking a walk around the immediate area. Nothing but the foundations were left of the smaller building behind the large house. There were chains half buried by dust and the collapsed boards of dog sheds, three, maybe four. 

Natasha picked them up to turn them over in her hands before dropping them with a sigh.

Well, this was all pretty useless. 

She was about to get back to her car when her attention was caught by a spot of colour in the corner of her eye, and she contemplated the first slopes and lower ridges of the mountain range ahead of her. Halfway up the mountainside, a small hill was covered by a carpet of muted yellow and red flowers. The rest of the mountainside was bare in comparison, and in a place as dead as this it was enough to be suspicious.

“Might as well,” she muttered to herself, tightening the straps on her boots and zipping her jacket up higher before starting to climb. ‘Eyes up high, vantage point’, and all that; Clint was so full of shit. 

She took her time, was in no hurry, after all, and she hadn’t climbed a mountain on foot in a while, certainly not since she’d joined SHIELD or the Avengers. Tony might have taken personal offence, and she had to smirk at that. Tony was full of shit too. 

Before, though, there had been mountains, days and weeks spent without seeing a soul. The memories had blurred in her mind over the years since, all the missions and places and people, and she wasn’t unhappy about it, not really. She had, after she’d joined SHIELD, stopped to assign significance to everything that had come before, had tried not to let it define her anymore. 

And now that her ledger lay open for the world to see, it was a strange sort of comfort to leave her memories to bleed into one another. 

The flower carpet started suddenly, growing sturdy among low shrubbery and moss, and definitely too out of place to have grown naturally. Patches of blue, red, orange, white, yellow and shades of pink alternated before her, leading down a small slope further into the rock, like a surprise meadow twisting around the shape of the mountain, almost invisible from the plain below.

Human made, it had to be.

The ground became less even as it took a turn around a rock formation that loomed high, casting shadows onto the groups of hyacinths and lilies, and as suddenly as it had begun, just around corner, the flower meadow ended before a vertical wall of stone that rose ten, twelve feet high into the sky. 

Natasha stood stunned for a moment, taking in the sight of countless hearts carved and scratched into the mountain wall, reaching as high as a foot above her head. Some were cruder than others; some looked almost tenderly chiselled into the surface. 

The click of the camera on her phone, and the soft hum of the scanner sounded loud in the silence that seemed to surround her, and she put it away after saving the file. She stepped forward, slowly closing the remaining distance and pressing her hand to the cold stone. 

Two sets of initials were carved in every heart, she realised, divided by a cut across. 

Natasha’s eyes trailed along the wall, searching for a deviance. Over a hundred hearts, all of them cut in two. Some of them bore dates, 1951, 1948, 1953, up to as recent as the early 1970s. The oldest date was 1946, beneath a heart that bore only one pair of initials. There were a few others with just one person engraved, Natasha realised, once she looked closer. Hearts for only one person, but just as broken. 

The flowers. 

A shiver crept up her neck when she turned around, understanding that what she had walked across was not a meadow, but the graveyard of all the people commemorated right there on sixty square feet of rock. 

But who’d have buried them, she wondered, and why had they died? Most of all, why would the Winter Soldier have been here, or remember this place? These people had died over the course of a decade, and burying his victims was hardly his MO. 

She took her phone out again, for a closer, better scan of the rock. Maybe there was something she’d missed, a little detail that she’d overlooked. 

She was crouching to reach the bottom corner and complete the close-up scan, when the tip of her shoe got caught under a small rock and unsettled her balance for a moment. Reaching down with her free hand and shuffling her feet for more stability, her gaze was caught by a small white pebble between her index and middle finger. 

Lifting it up and turning it over in her hand, it turned out not to be a pebble, after all. 

It was a tooth. 

A very _human_ tooth, judging by the metal filling that covered one side. 

Looking around the ground for more, Natasha, almost on a whim, moved a handful of larger rocks that lay by a pile of rubble at the foot of the wall. 

Buried beneath, safely held in a hole of solid rock, lay a collection of teeth, all of them molars, all of them with a silver filling down one side. Each filling engraved with a tiny, almost illegible number. 

The teeth spilled over the palm of her hand and a wave of horror overcame her, sudden and terrifying. Human teeth, numbered, each person nothing but a combination of digits. She looked up at the wall. Digits and initials.

“What _is_ this place?” 

She said it out loud, _needed_ to say it out loud just then, for the mere sake of hearing actual sound, and to draw herself out of her own head. She stood abruptly, gazing down at her hand and the hole in the ground, undecided. 

Natasha walked away from the wall more slowly than she’d walked towards it, eyes more open, the weight of countless molars heavy inside the handkerchief she’d wrapped them in, pressing against her side with every step. It wasn’t grave robbing, she convinced herself. If Vision was there, he could have stored all information worth having on them, but he wasn’t here, and they were the only removable thing of significance she’d found. What significance she didn’t know, but she was going to find out. 

She didn’t notice that there was a path back off the mountain until she was already on it. It had almost faded completely into the ground, barely visible, but the longer she looked, the more she could see it. It led away from where she’d climbed up, and didn’t seem to quite go back down to the building, but she decided to follow it anyway. 

On her way up she hadn’t stopped to look back; else she might have spotted it earlier. But she only saw it now, the faint patterns in the grassy ground some fifty, sixty yards away from the remaining building and her car, the destination of her path. Geometrical and visible only from above, the slightly lighter outlines of a foundation, all that was left of a building that had been levelled and erased from the picture. 

For a random place in the Kazakh outback it certainly kept on giving. Or maybe Natasha had gotten lazy. 

She found no more teeth when she moved through the area she’d seen from above - perfectly inconspicuous once she was on level - but when her phone picked up metal, she dug up the first thing that made her believe that Barnes had been onto anything useful at all: a bullet. 

A bullet she’d seen before. 

 

There were a hundred and fifty-seven hearts on the wall, Natasha counted over dinner, a hundred and forty-nine of them marked with two sets of initials, eight of them with only one. She also counted a hundred and fifty-four teeth of varying sizes, but all of them the upper left back molar. All the numbers began with the same digits, but were otherwise in no particular order that she could identify. 

She shuffled them around on the tabletop, spread out on a piece of cloth from her luggage, while she was shoving stew into her mouth. The food was lukewarm, came out of a can and was gross in a nostalgic kind of way that made it feel like a rare, guilty pleasure. 

One of Tony’s more sophisticated scanners could probably tell her a lot more about the teeth, she mused, but her phone had its limits. Her scans of the wall were little more than high resolution prints; no actual analytical data could be gathered from them apart from measurements. She’d have to take the teeth back to headquarters for information on age, sex, or any other useful details on their owners, and she wasn’t quite ready to go back there yet. 

Apart from that, the teeth were not the lead right now, the bullet was. If the bullet didn’t lead anywhere, she might just call it all in. 

With dinner finished and the teeth safely stowed away again, Natasha shoved the table out of the way, cleared the floor of clutter, grabbed her tablet from her backpack and dug through the triple encrypted, protected and probably intelligent Avengers network for archive footage. 

“ _JARVIS, take a look around_ ,” Tony’s voice said, and Natasha projected the three-dimensional image into the room. She could see the back of Tony’s head as he stepped away from the suit and into the room, before the camera swerved to take in their surroundings, constructing another environment inside the room. 

“ _What is this, the super secret broom closet of evil?” Clint said somewhere behind the Iron Man suit before stepping into view._

_“I can identify no traces of energy sources, organic or inorganic, Sir,_ ” JARVIS said from within the armour, and Natasha had to smile at how different from Vision he sounded, after all. “ _Spectral analysis is in process.”_

_The picture continued to move through the room, shiny metres, tiny screens and numbers running along the edges of the picture._

_“The place looks like it’s been cleaned out,” Steve said, hair spiky with his helmet pushed back. He looked disappointed, crouching by a lopsided storage shelf and peering into the drawers. Clint walked past him, eyes focused on the floor. “Any traces of that?”_

_“Yeah, you’re covering them with your fingerprints,” Tony threw in, himself looking up at the wiring along the ceiling. “This is all very vintage.”_

_“From the evidence I can gather, I assume that this room has not been in use in ten to fifteen years,” JARVIS replied, eyes right on Steve, whose gaze was darting past the armour all of a sudden. Tony had turned around too. “I would argue for the term retro, rather than vintage.”_

_“So, we got anything?” Her own voice._

_“The sceptre was never here,” Thor said, his arms crossed as he stepped into the picture, and the disappointment in his voice was heavy with frustration._

_“Another bust, then,” Steve bit out, busying himself with the straps of his glove with a gloomy face. “Nothing here but dust and a big fat nothing.”_

_It was quiet for a long moment during which they collectively hung their heads._

_“So... I came here just to walk all the way back, then?”_

Natasha watched her past self turn her head back to the door. She remembered smirking, even though all she could see through JARVIS’ eyes was the back of her head. 

_Bruce stepped into the picture, smiling half in embarrassment, half in wry encouragement in the face of Steve and Thor’s obvious misery._

_“Ha!” Clint’s voice broke into the gloom. When he turned away from digging in the dirt between a file cabinet and the wall, he was squinting at something between his fingers, and Natasha stepped over to him._

_“It’s a bullet,” Steve said blankly and JARVIS’ view zoomed in, search window running wild._

_“JARVIS?” Tony asked, superfluously. First small images were popping up in the top right field of the suit’s vision._

_“It appears to be a rare, custom model,” JARVIS said slowly, and Clint looked up, right at him._

_“I’ll tell you something about rare,” he began, holding the bullet up for all to see before passing it on to Natasha. “See the small inset right here at the tip and the symbol at the back? This bullet was made for one particular weapon only. Smaller than your standard gun at the time, and more accurate with less jamming. Collectors estimate that there’s about seven or eight of them left in the world today. There was only one dude who manufactured these in his little shop, back in World War Two, until he disappeared in 1944 without a trace, somewhere in Germany.” He looked around, his gleeful look turning just a little sheepish. “It’s one of the big mysteries of gun collecting.”_

_Thor’s disappointment had given way to bewilderment and Steve looked sceptical._

_“What?” Clint asked. “I have hobbies.”_

_“Well,” Tony said, gesturing at the room. “We might have solved that gun collecting mystery for you.”_

_“You think he joined HYDRA?” Steve didn’t sound convinced._

_“Or at least his designs did,” Bruce pointed out, hands shoved in his pockets. “Unless the gun that fired this bullet was one of the originals.”_

They went on, and Natasha knew she was about to mention that the KGB had still had one of those guns for specialised weapons training in the late 1980s, but now her attention was drawn to the calculations JARVIS was running quietly in the background. He was checking the walls next to where Clint stood and the remaining furniture for bullet holes and found a single hole and then, one by one, some others that had been patched up. The 3D model of the room filled up with bright dots and calculated parameters.

“ _I do not wish to sound ungrateful for your assistance and your... weapons trivia,” Thor’s voice boomed, “But none of this is helping us. We are looking for the sceptre, and every minute that we don’t find it heightens the danger for all of Midgard and the nine realms. We are wasting time in an empty broom closet.”_

_“Yeah, we know, Mufasa,” Tony said, already stepping back towards the armour. “Well, at least Barton got a nice souvenir to sell on ebay. Let’s pack it in.”_

_“Of course, sir,” JARVIS said politely, calculations grinding to a halt._

Natasha paused and rewinded the footage to just before JARVIS’ calculations gave way to Tony’s piloting interface. She followed the line the bullet had taken according to JARVIS’ calculations, and realised that whoever had fired the shot must have stood right by the back wall.

She walked around the hologram that filled the room until she stood where the shooter must have stood, except the distance seemed too short, the wall too close for a comfortable shot. The bullet had been badly aimed and ricocheted off the metal plating on the ceiling before hitting the wall off to the side. The nail not far above the final bullet hole meant that whoever had cleaned up the office after the shot had been fired had opted for hanging a picture rather than filling in the hole, like with the others. 

Natasha looked back up at the ceiling. There was the tiniest dent that was probably only visible because the computer image had highlighted it. 

How much of a lead was a rare bullet, found both in a HYDRA compound and an abandoned building with a graveyard attached? A building that came up nowhere, didn’t exist as far as anyone was concerned, and the Winter Soldier was the only one with half a memory of it. If the gun was as rare as Clint said, and JARVIS’s estimate of when it had been fired were correct, how big were the chances that the bullets had been fired from the same gun, by the same person? 

Natasha shook her head. 

“That’s one hell of a thin trail, Barnes,” she sighed, bending down to pick up her tablet and turn off the hologram. Her finger was hovering over the button when the smallest detail, barely more than an odd angle, or shadow in the floor where she’d stood, hit her like a two by four.


	3. Silken Threads

Back in the olden days at SHIELD, when she and Clint had been the closest thing to superheroes around, and their team had consisted of three people only, Clint had gotten lost on a mission in Georgia. Natasha had only just made the evac, and for two long, terrible weeks, she and Phil hadn’t known whether Clint had made it out alive. Finally, the most offensively kitschy postcard from some backwater town in Romania had reached Laura in Iowa and she’d called them at their not-yet-destroyed-by-aliens apartment in New York, promising fire and brimstone down upon Clint’s reckless, stupid head if he ever dared to show his face on her doorstep ever again.

The same postcards were still being sold at the town’s bus station, Natasha realised, when she got off the coach. She hadn’t noticed when she’d been there with the Avengers a couple of months back, had barely even spent time off the quinjet, really, and Clint hadn’t said anything, either. 

The HYDRA base they’d raided, though, was exactly as they had left it, blasted wide open (Tony), electricity fried (Thor, accidentally), and strategically made inaccessible to strolling civilians (Steve) to keep them safe from the even more strategically placed alarms and barely dangerous booby traps (Clint). 

Natasha went through the entire building complex again, even though the room the recording had been taken in was her foremost priority. Still, she hadn’t noticed that one thing the first time around, she might have overlooked many others. There were gaps in JARVIS’ recording of the place and if she knew anything, then it was that to find traces of the Winter Soldier, minute details were the only chance of finding anything. If she was that lucky.

The place felt colder, creepier without the rest of the team there the further she went underground. Well, she had a high-tech flashlight. It was practically like having Thor there. 

Careful not to trip anything, she stepped through Clint’s first line of alarm mechanisms, dismantling the few motion sensor arrowheads that she could reach easily and dodging and memorising the location of the remaining ones in case she needed to make a quick exit. 

It wasn’t actually like Tony couldn’t know that she’d come back here, but she didn’t want to lie to Steve about why. So Tony really couldn’t know that she’d come back here. 

Walking past the former control room with dozens of broken screens filling the wall, she could feel a sudden cold grasp of horror clutching at her throat. She couldn’t have said why; the screens were dark, there was no crackling of dying electricity, and no gears started turning. No Arnim Zola appeared on the screens to say her name. 

Yet, irrationally, she looked behind herself, listening intently, before tearing herself away and moving on, a little more slowly than before. 

Which was ridiculous because it was perfectly quiet, except for the soft sound of air brushing through the empty corridors, and apart from the noise she herself made, there was nothing to be heard. She was alone. 

She shook her head and scolded herself for being a chicken before stepping past the next couple of rooms - offices, judging from their wrecked interior - and walking on down the corridor and steps towards the last chamber at the very back of the base. Her footsteps slowed and she came to a halt where she knew Clint had left a couple more sensors, and more elaborate ones, too. Not many people would walk this far into the base to begin with, so those who did were worth knowing about, he’d reasoned. 

It was pitch dark save for the small circle of her flashlight. Crouching down, she pulled out her phone, ignoring the cold sweat that was sending shivers down her spine. 

Why had she come? Why had she come back to this... grave? What for, other than a man she didn’t trust and didn’t care for? 

A man who’d tried to kill her more than once, and had damn near succeeded too. 

When she’d handed Steve that folder, she’d half expected all leads in it to be dead, and for good reason. She herself had tried to follow them ten years ago, and had come up with nothing, save the knowledge that he was being kept in cryo freeze between missions, and which measures had been taken to prep him for a single mission near Kiev shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. All the people mentioned in the file were dead. 

And maybe she was glad for it. Some things were better left in the unknown; some memories left better unrecovered, for Steve’s sake just as much as for Barnes’ sake. If anyone should know then it was her-

Her breath hitched and her thoughts grinded to a halt at the sound of a small pebble hitting the ground somewhere behind her. 

She was listening intently. There, in the dead silence, was the tiniest breath of fabric moving. 

Natasha stilled, slowing down her breath and heartbeat.

She wasn’t alone.

She wasn’t imagining things.

She had a reason to be terrified, didn’t she? 

Whatever she’d heard, or thought she’d heard, had been swallowed up by silence again. Even the wind had quietened down. 

She could just cast another look back- 

No, she told herself as she switched off her flashlight, _focus_. There was a web of laser triggers ahead of her. 

Even though she’d memorised the pattern of triggers, her hands were shaking and she almost stumbled and fell through the last couple of light barriers, nearly kicking off the alarm and blowing her cover. 

She bit down on the F about to escape her lips. She might as well call Tony and Steve right now if she didn’t get her act together, and quickly. Slowly and gingerly, she wiggled under the final barrier, heaving a sigh when she was on safe ground again. 

There was nothing behind her, she realised as she looked back. Nothing she could see, or hear, or that her phone picked up. 

The tiniest voice in her head suggested that maybe she was beginning to lose her shit. 

“You’ll start getting scared at horror movies next,” she muttered quietly, rotating her shoulders and neck and turning back to face ahead. She was standing in the door to what had once been a weapons depot, which Tony had made sure held no more actually dangerous items, but which had been diagnosed by JARVIS as being structurally unsound after Thor had slammed Mjolnir down on it. It was JARVIS’ nice way of saying that there was a giant crack in the floor from one end of the room to the other. 

At the back of the room, however, was the small chamber she was here to revisit. The chamber in which they all had missed something; what exactly she was going to find out once she’d made it across. 

There were two stink bomb arrowheads that Clint had placed there for pure shits and giggles, which she gladly avoided. She had also disabled the almost invisible motion sensor by the door before stepping into the room and planning the easiest way to get to the door at its back. There were scorch marks on the floor where Tony’s suit had landed. 

She reached the crack in the floor and peered down into the darkness, trying to fend off the feeling of unease that seemed to grasp at her from the deep. 

She shook her head, then looked for a narrow point to step across. 

Ridiculous. 

Cracks were creepy, all right, especially deep black ones in an underground HYDRA base. 

Still, no reason to sweat it like she did when she jumped, carefully, as to not land too hard on her feet and tread loose any _structurally unsound_ parts of the floor. She could still hear some small stones falling down into nothingness behind her. 

She stepped ahead and away from the chasm, scolding herself for her own nervousness. Her hair was sticking to her forehead and her hands were sweaty when she swiped away what felt like cobwebs brushing across her eyes. 

Blinking and looking down, she saw the long, black thread stuck to her fingers when her hand came away from her face. 

A fine, dark strand of hair had descended from the ceiling above her. 

She forced herself to keep moving and breathing deeply and quietly, while her ears perked up to make out the soft sound of fine dust drizzling onto the floor behind her. Her own footsteps more or less inaudible, she was sure she wasn’t imagining the other sounds now, the gentle whisper of clothing on skin, almost indistinguishable from the sound of moving air. 

She hadn’t been dreaming, she thought grimly, hand casually reaching down to the gun at her hip, muscles tensing and preparing to snap into action.

She was not alone. 

Her gunshot was loud in the silence, and rocks and concrete came raining down when her bullet hit the ceiling. Rolling with her controlled fall to the ground she’d been firing at the first thing she saw. 

Whatever she’d shot at had been faster than her bullet, though, retreating along the ceiling in a blur and vanishing in the darkness. Natasha’s eyes followed along as she picked up the flashlight she’d dropped, squinting at the dark to make out shapes or movements. There was a sound of fabric off to her right and her light - and her gun - were on point. 

A second shot rang through the darkness, followed by silence when Natasha turned off the light again. Slinking back into the shadows, she waited.

For eight long, long minutes, there was neither sight nor sound of whatever, or whoever, was in the base with her, somewhere in the miles of tunnelling and underground chambers. 

The realisation hit her that she was neither shaking nor sweating anymore, as if the dread that had sat so deeply in her bones had released its grip on her from one second to the next. 

Knowing wasn’t so bad. It was not knowing that was terrifying. 

Maybe that was why she was here, following Barnes’ half-assed trail, despite anyone’s better judgement.

She waited for another ten minutes before she moved, stealthily and noiselessly further into the darkness, blacked-out torch and cell phone tucked away under her jacket. She could see well enough in the dark by now, and there were no sensors beyond that point that she needed to worry about. 

Making her way towards the room from the recording, she stopped at its door, sensing into the silence for traces that she was still being followed. She was entirely certain that she was, but either they were being more careful than before, or they were keeping their distance. 

Later, she’d deal with that later. 

Entering the small back room, Natasha took her phone back out and, in the low glow of its display, began to step around the toppled furniture towards the back corner. The floor of the chamber was even, except for the occasional crack that was either Thor’s fault, or time’s, and the mess of furniture that had been falling apart since long before Tony had swept into the room. There were footprints in the dust, still fresh from when they’d been here, and little scorch marks where Tony had landed. 

And there in the back corner, beneath the small layer of dust on the floor, there was a slightly protruding brick in the wall, almost unnoticeable amidst the general rubble, sticking out from the wall maybe an inch. Just large enough to stub with the tip of her foot. 

Above it, carved into the stone wall, was a small, broken heart. 

Her own breath loud in her ears, Natasha pressed her fingers against the stone, and the floor beneath her began to move. 

 

A chilly breeze was moving the treetops outside, and Natasha slammed the trunk of her car shut after taking a bottle of water out of her travel bag. Leaning against the back she stared into the woods around her. 

Empty. Empty. Empty. There had been a hidden cellar beneath the room, filled with file cabinets. 

And they had all been empty. 

Or no, she corrected herself, not empty. Empt _ied_. 

And those footprints in the dust had been more recent than hers or the team’s. 

She stared into space for a long moment, fighting back the urge to throw her bottle at something, and pulled herself together. 

She wasn’t done here yet, and she might find answers after all if she managed to keep her head. 

Still, they had stood on god knows what had been in those cabinets. It could have been the jackpot. How, how had they missed this? How had they not seen this? 

Someone else had been there. Someone out there knew more than her, more than all of them, and she hadn’t even realised until half an hour ago. 

Out of the corner of her eye she could see movement, and ducked behind her car, pulling out her gun. 

She watched as a woman pulled herself out of an opening in the ground that must have led down into the HYDRA compound through another route. Straightening up from her crouch, the woman pulled off her woollen hat, releasing long, black hair that fell down her back and taking a couple of deep breaths. 

Natasha could see from the way she suddenly stood still, head slightly cocked to one side, that she’d noticed Natasha, and the gun that was pointed at her. Slowly she turned to face her, hands held a little away to the side, palms open. 

Natasha took a deep breath, realising how the chill that had crawled up her back earlier was suddenly back, and the hairs at the back of her neck were standing up. 

“Whatever you’re trying to do,” she said, her voice as steady as she could make it. “Stop it.” Her gun arm was steady, even though her knees were wobblier than they had been a minute ago.

There was no reply from the woman, who still glared at Natasha defiantly, muscles tight, and Natasha pulled the trigger a mere split second too late. The woman had dashed – jumped? – to the side, pulling herself up the side tree like a squirrel and vanishing from view. 

Natasha gave herself half a heartbeat to be surprised, then moved for a better angle, scanning the surrounding crowns of the trees for movements. 

There was a rustling of leaves to one side, louder than the constant backdrop of leaves moving in the wind, and the cracking of twigs echoed down from above. 

Natasha fired two more shots in the direction of the woman when she spotted her fleeing across the trees, then started running. 

It took her about a hundred metres and another near-miss shot to realise that there was no point in pursuit. The ground was uneven and full of brush and thickets, and she kept falling further and further behind the dark blur ahead of her. 

She’d lost. 

Frustration crept up the back of her neck the same way the fear had earlier and back in the cave. Trudging back to her car, she kicked a lonely standing mushroom across the forest ground. 

 

The final click was coming through the re-appropriated radio, and Natasha sighed and dropped back into her chair, reaching for her almost empty can of beer. 

She had been brooding for the better part of the night, frustrated with the empty vault, Barnes’ disconnected words, and most of all the disquieting feeling that there was an ever growing blind spot that she was only now becoming aware of. She had questioned everything from her decision to go back to her safe house in town, to her decision to come to Europe in the first place. She could have continued to play heroes with the team and instead she was digging up empty graves with a plastic spoon. 

Then she had told herself to pull it together and get her head back in the game. 

Natasha didn’t have a habit of drinking on the job, but she was also trained to drink on the job if necessity required her to. 

Necessity or not, it had been a reason to get some air and relieve the kink in her back. A six pack of beer was hardly hard alcohol, but it could replace dinner, which she had no motivation of cooking. 

And it was such an inconspicuous reason to cast her web. Because that’s what she did, walking through Kiev at one in the morning. 

Her pursuer eventually made herself known by knocking on her door just when Natasha had thrown out the radio and finished her beer. 

“Come in,” Natasha greeted her, walking back to the kitchen corner and leaving the door open behind her. “Want beer?” 

The woman looked surprised, almost disturbed, but stepped across the threshold and closed the door behind herself. Natasha threw her a quick look, taking in the casual street clothes, the black ponytail, and the smartphone in her hand. The way she looked at Natasha spelled “I looked you up on Google after our encounter” in bold letters, and Natasha tried not to feel bitter about how, yes, these days that was all it took. 

She threw the woman a can of beer before walking back to her chair and sitting down. She caught it with her free hand and stepped further into the room. 

“What’s your name?” Natasha asked as she leaned back and put her feet up on the table, and the woman turned the can of beer over in her hand, pondering the question. 

“You’re not surprised to see me,” she said, putting her phone away, hand moving to unbelt her coat, but hesitating. “You’d know I’d come. How?” 

“Call it a hunch.” Natasha shrugged and took her second long sip of her beer. 

“You’re an Avenger.” 

“And I’m sure you’re going to explain to me that you’re not HYDRA,” Natasha countered and the woman’s mouth twitched in bitter amusement. Her shoulders were pulled back and her gaze sharp. 

“That’s gonna be difficult.” She stepped over to the table Natasha was sitting at and put down the can of beer. “We both know that I am.” 

Bingo. Natasha kept her face calm and guileless, even though something in her was rejoicing. This, this was what she was good at. 

“You’re not afraid of me,” the woman continued, sounding intrigued, “And you’re not shooting at me... yet?” 

“Unless you pull your mojo on me?” Natasha replied, crossing her ankles on the table. “I don’t scare easily, no offence. Have a beer. I want to talk.” 

The emotions that flashed across the woman’s face told Natasha that she was on the right way. 

“So what is your name, then?” 

“They called me Arachne. The Spider.” The woman sat down opposite Natasha and eyed her, fingers fiddling with the opening of the can. Her eyes were green and piercing in the yellowish light dangling down from the ceiling. 

“Never mind what they called you,” Natasha continued. “What do you call yourself?”

The woman considered for a while. 

“Jessica. Jess,” she said eventually. 

“Natasha.” 

“I know.” Jessica took a large gulp of beer. “So why were you at the old base? Your team destroyed it months ago.” 

“I was looking for something we might have missed,” Natasha said, and a flash of fear shone in Jessica’s eyes. 

“But you didn’t find anything.” 

“No,” Natasha admitted after a pause. She opened another can of beer. “Why were you there? What were you looking for?” 

“Myself,” Jessica replied reluctantly. “To make sure I was dead. To kill whatever was left.” 

“You want to know if we found anything?” Natasha asked and Jess’ voice was hard. 

“I want to live,” she said. “You Avengers aren’t even my main concern, believe me. If you knew what I am-” 

“I know what you are,” Natasha interrupted, balling up her first, empty can of beer between her hands and tossing it onto the table between them. “I have met people like you.” 

Jessica’s eyes darkened. 

“Well, all of us were not as lucky as the twins,” she said. “You know what they did with the other ones when you and your friends started raiding facilities all over the world? The ones they still had locked up elsewhere?” 

“You’re erasing all traces of yourself to stop them from hunting you down,” Natasha concluded when she understood. She hadn’t known. She’d suspected from Jess’ performance in the woods and her relation to HYDRA what she might be, but had never before thought to wonder if there had been more experiments than the twins, or how many there had been. What had happened to them? They had never encountered any others. 

“Bury them so deep,” Jessica added darkly, “So not even their own ghosts find them.” 

Natasha smiled bitterly. 

“Ironic,” she said quietly. “Finding ghosts is what I’m all about, too.” 

“There was someone at the base,” Jess said, her tone indicating that she was getting to whatever she’d come here to say in the first place. “You saw it. They came before you or me showed up, but after your team was there.” 

She put down a handful of small pieces of paper on the table. Her gaze was sharp. 

“This is all they left. They’re meaningless to me, but maybe you can use them.” 

Natasha took her feet off the table, sat up straight in her seat and reached out with her hands. 

“What do you want in return?” she asked. 

 

The air above the sleeping city was aglow with a muted nocturnal hum that never rested, and the Winter Soldier prowled along a rooftop, eyes searching for movements in the shadows. He knew they were there, faceless people who had followed him for weeks, across half a continent.

For two days he’d been on their tracks as much as they had been on his. 

Now, as he lowered himself from the rooftop onto a fire escape, crouching low and pulling his gun from his belt, he was about to finally overtake them and become the one who was doing the hunting. 

His breath came steady, his arms locked in secure aim. He could hear footsteps below, every step sharpening his sense of space and distance. Five more steps and he wouldn’t need light to know where to aim his gun. 

The sting to the back of his neck came suddenly and out of nowhere, betraying no sound as the projectile cut through the night air and pricked his skin. 

The Winter Soldier sank paralysed onto the cold metal he was kneeling on, his arm clinking faintly in his ear while his vision and hearing slowly drifted away from him. He was unconscious by the time the sniper approached him on soft soles and dragged him off the roof and into the back of a waiting vehicle two dark streets away.


	4. Lacunae

Four days later, Natasha felt like she hadn’t left her place on the moth-ridden sofa ever since she’d sat down with her laptop and all the information she had managed to find so far. She had searched databases and the internet, had even called a contact only to be able to discard a theory of a connection somewhere. 

She’d run the coordinates of the place in Khazakhstan, read up on the gunmaker Clint had mentioned, had even searched for the broken heart symbol, all to no avail. And none of these things corresponded in any way to the slips of paper Jessica had allegedly found. Which Natasha still wasn’t sure she could entirely trust.

There were twelve of the small slips of paper, probably labels for folders or file cabinets, judging by their size and the fact that they each had a number and a single word typewritten onto them. They were either place names or seemingly random words, all of them German.

_51000021 Homunkulus_ the smallest number read, then _52000025 Herakles, 52000027 David, 52000030 Titanic (F)_. There was deviance in the rest of the serial numbers: _K55X10302 Exekutor, K56X11003 Weberknecht, K63X31109 Strumpfband, F67X21502 Karneval, K67X33006 Zündkerze, K71X10206 Vater (F), F72X20206 Jagdfieber_. And, finally, as the only thing that still kept her on her trail, _F72X99999 Winterschlaf_. 

Natasha couldn’t allow herself to believe in coincidences, and this was the first time the word _Winterschlaf_ had appeared anywhere in connection to HYDRA. The only proof so far that Barnes hadn’t just had a nightmare. 

She had tried to break down the numbers to find out how they were constructed. They were with almost clear certainty labels for mission files, not personal files, and the numbers were too high to be exclusively consecutive, not to mention the letters. There had to be some kind of system to them.

The words themselves didn’t tell her much. Mythology, random names and nouns that were probably metaphorical at best. If her assumption was correct that the first two digits indicated the year, then the Titanic had made a spectacular comeback in 1952. There were also no suspicious mass killings or executions that tipped off any alarm bells in 1954. Scrolling down the list of results that the Avengers, formerly SHIELD, database spewed at her, she had reached the end of “events, missions, incidents” and had landed at what equalled the trivia section of wikipedia, full of footnotes of history that hadn’t ever really concerned SHIELD directly. 

_February 3rd 1955_ , an entry read, an inconspicuous one-liner, _suicide(?) of Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin._

Natasha frowned. She knew the name; he’d been responsible for massacres under Stalin’s regime. _Exekutor_. Executioner. It fit - the only question was whether or not it made a difference to her. There was a small footnote of a suspected HYDRA link of the man, but on the whole Wikipedia had a longer entry on him than SHIELD. 

Vladimir Blokhin, the most prolific executioner in history, had been awarded honours under Stalin and eventually gone insane and allegedly killed himself. Whether HYDRA had had a hand in either his executions or his suicide was anyone’s guess. 

The only thing that gave Natasha pause was the fact that almost all of the dates on the tags were dated earlier than the first allegedly confirmed mission of the Winter Soldier. 

So they were either entirely unrelated and useless, or they were referring to a timeframe where nobody knew where or in which state exactly the Winter Soldier had been. There was a gap of about thirty years in the history of the Winter Soldier, between the day Barnes had fallen and the first assassination had been ascribed to the ghost “Winter Soldier”, and there was disagreement in the intelligence community on whether any incidents before the seventies were actually his work in the first place, or simply an extension of the myth. 

Of course it could have been him even before; kept in cryo all this time without anyone putting the dots together-

“Maybe it’s not what you want to hear, but you were pretty thorough,” Jess interrupted Natasha’s train of thought, herself busy looking at the map of the world that was projected onto the wall, on which small red dots indicated all the HYDRA bases the Avengers had turned into ruins after the fall of SHIELD. Jess had been going through all the Avengers’ files for days, trying to find out whether she or her father were mentioned anywhere. So far, Natasha understood, she’d found nothing. 

“There are no more bases that I know of that weren’t already abandoned in the first place. You even blew up some that nobody had set foot in in decades.” 

Natasha let herself fall back against the couch cushions and rubbed her eyes, sighing wearily.

“How big are the chances that there are more that you don’t know of?” she asked, mentally running through the list of bases, discarding the ones that were completely wiped from the face of the earth after they’d been done with them, and estimating which of the remaining ones might be worth another visit. 

“Ginormous,” Jess said dryly. “I was a lab rat after my father died; they didn’t really give me the grand tour. But I found the heart symbol you were looking for in the footage of three other bases.”

“Which ones?” Natasha perked up, looking at the map.

“One ninety kilometres outside Moscow,” Jess pointed at it, “One in Eastern Siberia, and one in Slovakia, close to the Austrian border.” 

“Do they have anything in common?” 

“No. They’re all old, like, pre Cold War old. It’s difficult to say if they had anything else in common. Leadership after the war was inconsistent and subject to pretty quick changes.” She looked at Natasha. “We could pay them a visit. I haven’t been to them yet; they’re still on my list.” 

Natasha looked at the map. They could go, yes. And the chances that they’d find them as empty as the last one were exceedingly high. 

“Let’s just have lunch,” Natasha said, throwing up her arms. 

“It’s five-thirty in the afternoon,” Jess pointed out. 

“Dinner,” Natasha corrected, smirking. “Even better. You can have alcohol with dinner and it’s not weird.” 

 

“Do you have an idea of what you’re going to do after?” Natasha asked, slicing carrots into a pot of water on the stove. 

“Not superheroing, in case this is the beginning of your recruiting speech.” Jess put down her can of beer and upended the bag of pasta into another pot. She eyed Natasha while adding water and continued over the sound of the tap, “I’m not freaky enough, though I never thought I’d say that to anyone, ever.” 

“We’re not all freaky,” Natasha said, even though recruitment hadn’t been on the forefront of her mind. 

“You have a collection of human teeth on your nightstand,” Jess pointed out, setting the pot with the pasta onto to stove next to the carrots. Natasha smirked. 

“I said not _all_ of us,” she repeated. “Like, Falcon’s the most wholesome baby bunny you’ll ever meet.”

“Yeah, but I’m not exactly ‘wholesome’ either.” Jess had started chopping the rest of the vegetables, ignoring Natasha’s casual speed with slicing carrots. 

“Well, if you ever think of joining the circus, I know someone who can hook you up.” Natasha turned to her own can of beer before picking up the next carrot. 

“Thanks,” Jess said, sounding amused. “I’ll keep that in mind.” 

 

“American, actually,” Jess answered the question, lounging in an armchair in the living room and recouping from a fairly large helping of pasta and vegetables. “Went to Yale, summa cum laude.” 

“How did he end up a HYDRA scientist?” Natasha probed and Jess hesitated for a moment, then let her head fall back and looked at the ugly lamp that dangled from the ceiling. 

“He was just a scientist,” she said, biting her lip. “My mother died when I was born, I think. We’d all moved to a new country because there was a man who my Dad thought could save her. And then later I got very sick, and the man my Dad was working for, Dr. Faustus, said he could help him find a cure.” She smirked humourlessly at Natasha. “I don’t know about cure, but he kept me from dying, at least.” She shrugged and looked around the room for her cup of coffee, grabbing it to take a big sip. “I never really did find out whether he’d already been a part of HYDRA before, or whether he stayed because he was afraid they’d kill me for real if he tried to leave. Like they probably killed my mother, if we’re being realistic.” 

“I’m sorry,” Natasha said, knowing that it sounded empty enough, but she said it anyway. 

“Yeah, he was too. I was only three when he tried to get us both out after Faustus died, but you know how it goes,” She looked at Natasha. “Cut off one head...” 

“Two more shall take its place.” 

“More than two,” Jess said. “I was too young to get it then, but it was like war. Faustus’ main base was taken out by the Americans, his successor killed by the Russians, and for the next ten years my father didn’t know who he was working for. Strucker was moving in on Europe from Japan as the Cold War drew to a close and tried to recruit me. My father died a few months before the Wall fell and the Russians lost their hold on Eastern Europe. Strucker picked me up along with what he could salvage of Faustus’ experimentation, and I was passed from lab to lab for another ten years.” 

“What is it you can do?” Natasha asked, honestly intrigued. “Never mind the climbing thing, what about the... whatever it is you’re doing?” 

Jessica pursed her lips. 

“Pheromones.” She cocked her head. “Not as cool as crawling along ceilings and up the side of buildings, but it’s useful.” 

“You can incite terror in others when you’re threatened,” Natasha muttered. “Now that’s a superpower I’d like to have.” 

“Not just terror,” Jess corrected. “Also attraction, distraction. And calm, but that only really works when I’m calm myself.” 

“Do you know if there were ever any others? Besides you?” 

“The twins,” Jess said, “But I saw them on TV, never in person.” 

“I have to say I never knew much about how HYDRA worked,” Natasha admitted. “I think I still don’t. For all I knew they were dead long before I was born and all followed the same drum. Zola made it sound like there was one Master Plan.” 

Jessica bit back a yawn then shook her head. 

“World domination. Chaos,” she shrugged. “All the heads have a common body, but each of them will sink their teeth into a different prey. Occasionally each other, even.” 

Natasha didn’t reply. There was logic to what she described, she could see how it would make sense to spread chaos, as Zola had put it, by being everywhere. By being a part of SHIELD. Everywhere, and nowhere. 

Needles in a thousand haystacks.

 

She had to fill the bottle halfway up with water to make use of the few remains of shampoo for one last wash. The water pressure was good, quite possibly the only decent thing about the apartment, and so she took her sweet time showering. 

Leaning back against the tiles and letting the warm water wash over her, she silently asked her brain for a revelation. Her thoughts felt like they’d become tangled in a knot of disjointed information about a terrorist organisation that cannibalised its own weaknesses and seemed to leave no traces itself. Somehow they had taken a man and made him entirely disappear, with only rumours left behind. 

She hadn’t managed to find the Winter Soldier through his assassinations when she had first looked into him, Steve hadn’t managed to trace him back through SHIELD, or HYDRA itself, even. 

What if there was really nothing to find? What if there was no way of finding out what had happened to James Buchanan Barnes after he’d been killed in action? 

Maybe there was nothing more to him than a series of disjointed assassinations interrupted by long periods of deep sleep. Hibernation, _Winterschlaf_. 

Wrapping her hair in a towel and stepping out onto the mangled bathroom, her eyes fell on the steamed up mirror. 

It seemed a long time ago that she’d looked in the mirror and seen a young, impressionable barista there, guileless and average, and able to fit into any group. Someone who got invited to the ballet by beautiful strangers who made her feel special. 

She could miss it, Natasha realised wistfully. Just a little bit. 

The light that was fixed right above the mirror was flickering, and she could see the long legs of a spider probing around the fixture from above. 

A harvestman. сенокосец. 

She looked at it and the seconds were ticking by loudly on her watch by the sink. 

_Weberknecht._

“We need to go to Moscow,” was the first thing she blurted out when she left the bathroom, hair hanging wet and unkempt onto her shoulders. 

When Jess, who was finishing the leftovers of the vegetable pasta just looked at her without understanding, she went over to the table and picked up the little label that read _K56X11003 Weberknecht_. 

“This was a Black Widow operation,” she said, mind running full speed. Jess looked bewildered. 

“In the 1950s?” 

“The Black Widow programme was founded after the war,” Natasha explained with a wave of her hand. “The Red Room was created as a sub-branch of the KGB and trained agents up until... well, me. More or less. I was the last one. But...” 

She started pacing, absent-mindedly wiping at the drops of water that ran down her arms. 

“You said the Russians killed Faustus’ successor. If...” She took a deep breath. “If another branch of HYDRA had access to the KGB the same way Zola had access to SHIELD – if HYDRA was also working through the KGB, then...” 

Then she herself might have been an agent for HYDRA way before SHIELD. She swallowed around the knot in her throat.

If HYDRA had been inside the Red Room... 

She shook her head.

But even if it was only this one operation that had involved HYDRA, there was a record. Not on paper, she was almost certain, but in the head of the person who had told Natasha about the harvestmen operation when she’d been a little girl. 

Aleksandr Lukin was still alive; the only Red Room leader still alive. 

Natasha knew; she kept tabs. 

“I need to make some calls,” she said, running a hand through her hair. She felt dizzy all of a sudden. “And some air. You... you should probably get some sleep.” 

 

By the time Natasha came back from her walk, the morning sun was already creeping across the horizon. 

She could smell him the moment she stepped into the small apartment, the scent that he carried with him, the combination of a million scents that somehow cumulated in a feeling of home. And the smell of-

“Thought I’d surprise you,” he said, his back to her as he helped himself to coffee, turning around with his face half hidden behind a mug. He looked so tired and Natasha’s heart clenched a little when she went to hug him. 

“I didn’t expect you until tomorrow,” she muttered and could feel the mug of coffee touch her back as he hugged her in return. 

“You know me, I always go the extra mile,” he smiled, nodding over her shoulder at the ledger on the kitchen table. “And I brought all the goods.” 

“Who are you?” Jess’s voice suddenly asked from behind them, and Natasha moved a step back. Jess looked alarmed and Clint, unbearably suave as he tended to be, put down his mug and grabbed the coffee pot for a refill. 

“This is Clint,” Natasha said, gesturing between them. “Clint, Jess, Jess, Clint.”   
Jess continued to glare at Clint through sleepy eyes. Her hair was all over the place; she had to have fallen asleep in the living room after a shower the night before. Behind her, the sofa cushions were mashed into the armrest of the mouldy couch and a blanket had fallen to the floor. 

“And you’re here why?” Jess asked, still looking suspicious. 

“Because I am charming and adorable,” Clint replied, and it would have been smooth had he not raised the pot instead of the mug to take another sip. Coffee splashed down the front of his shirt.

Jess was still glaring at him while he wiped coffee off his chin, smiling winningly like an idiot. 

“I asked him to join me here before you showed up,” Natasha explained. It was technically true. “He’s a friend. There’s no need to mojo him.” 

“I’m not,” Jess said sternly and Clint took an elegant sip from the coffee pot without spilling anything this time. 

“She’s not,” he confirmed, leaning in to Natasha and muttering, “Mojo me how?” 

“I’ll explain later,” Natasha said, focusing on Jessica again. “I called him for backup before you joined me. We can’t do this mission alone.” 

“Oh, and what mission is that all of a sudden?” Jess protested, running her hands through her hair. “This was not part of the deal!” 

“You help me,” Natasha said, holding Jess’ glance. “And I help you. That’s the deal.” 

“Yeah, this totally looks like you’re going to help me.” 

“Dude, yes! I’m an Avenger!” Clint blurted out, seemingly offended. “We always keep our word! Want me to put you on the phone with Captain America?” He leaned in to Natasha again. “What is it we’re helping her with?” 

“Actually, why isn’t _he_ here?” Jess countered. “Why didn’t you call the Captain in while you were at it?” 

Natasha sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose with one hand. 

“Yeah, actually this isn’t something the Captain can know about. Which is why I called Clint. He’s dodgy enough for this.” 

“So dodgy,” Clint confirmed. 

Jess’ eyes fell to the folder on the table and, still looking disgruntled and sceptic, she stepped over to pick it up and flap it open. 

 

The Winter Soldier snapped awake violently, back arching upwards into the restraints that kept him tied down to the bed’s frame. He couldn’t move his metal arm, and his other one wasn’t strong enough to tear through the straps wrapped around his wrists. 

A scream had woken him up. 

Blinking rapidly, he tried to get a look at his surroundings, but his brain was muddled and it was hard to clear his vision. 

Indiscriminate noises assaulted his ears, until they finally translated into the sound of wood creaking under him, cars somewhere far away, the sound of voices, agitated and stern, the smell of different foods, the sound of water running somewhere else in the building he was in, the distant howling of sirens from outside the window, the light from which was blinding his eyes. Faint, almost inaudible birdsong. 

Voices. Human voices talking. 

Steps somewhere outside the room. 

The sound of wood hitting hard floor. 

The clicking of a door handle. 

He groaned, straining so hard against the ropes that held him, it came out almost like a wail. His body wasn’t working right, his strength wasn’t there.

“You’re awake.” 

He grit his teeth, eyes turned back in his head to see the people who had entered the room. One person had stopped by the door. 

“You’re not in danger,” he heard, and his human hand was untied and caught in an iron grip when it lashed out instinctively. 

“I’m sorry it had to be this way. You’re safe.” His hand was released and he let it fall limply down his side. His fingers, when he flexed them, felt weak and useless. 

“You had to come,” the voice continued, and someone sat down on the bed beside him, outlined sharply against the light from the window. He squinted, heart still racing with an overwhelming flight impulse. “I can’t do this without you.” 

His breath was ragged, until slowly, shade by shade, his sight cleared and revealed the face of Natasha Romanoff looking at him calmly, intently. Behind her, holding an empty pot of coffee, stood his captor, looking... It took him a moment to recognise the sentiment before he scowled back at it.

Apologetic. 

“I need your help,” Natasha Romanoff said, accepting a stack of paper from the man and offering them to him. Words and pictures. “You want to find answers, you’re going to have to be along for the ride.” 

He squinted his eyes into focus. Hearts carved into stone, dozens of them. Cold fingers wrapped around his lungs and with a flash he could feel a fragile small body against his side, thin fingers holding on to his neck, strands of blonde hair obstructing his view. In the darkness, the wall of hearts was glowing orange and the dark outline of a body rose to its feet in front of it, turning around- 

“They were all dead!” he screamed, and under him the wooden frame of the bed was cracking.


	5. All the Children of Pride

She made sure to get fresh fruit, eggs, the 3-for-2 offer on laundry detergent, two packs of universal flour and brown sugar, and a bottle of olive oil to cover up the amount of cans, individually packaged snacks and other survival food people went on the run with. She picked up bathroom cleaner, toilet freshener, three large bottles of lilac-scented shampoo (Clint would live), two scented candles (she would live), a pair of cheap earrings that took her seven and a half minutes to pick out, an eyeliner on sale, tampons, and anti- frizz hairspray along with antiseptic wipes, band aids and sterile bandages in the next shop that she went to. She was on her way home, stopping just for a moment to admire a pair of shoes in a store window and look at the shop door indecisively, when her phone rang. 

"Getting tired of the creeping?" She asked by way of greeting and the reflection of a man on the other side of the street shifted. 

" _Fancy meeting you here._ " He sounded amused. " _Heard you were in the wind._ " 

"Yeah?" Natasha had picked up her shopping and moved on down the street, taking a turn away from their safe house at the next opportunity. "Who says that sort of thing?" 

" _Laura Barton_ ," came the reply, and Natasha checked the side mirror of a parked car to see if she was still being followed. Sure enough, he turned the corner little time after her, wearing...

"Let me guess, they were all out of trench coats at the undercover shop?" She muttered into her phone as she entered a small cafe, walking right through to the back and sitting down. 

"No," Nick Fury replied, when he sat down opposite her, phone in hand. Natasha smirked and raised a pointed eyebrow at his clerical attire. 

"Is that appropriate?" 

"Necessity tops propriety." He touched the white collar of his clerical daytime costume cautiously when the waitress came to take their order. "So, I’ll be going out on a limb and assume the reason Barton left his farming career was to join you here?" 

"Did he leave a trail?" Natasha asked, figuring it was confirmation enough. 

"Not that I know of," Fury replied, smiling beatifically when the waitress brought their coffees. "He knows his shit. You both do. Took me some time to be sure it was you, even." 

"Flatterer." She took a sip of coffee. "So this isn't an intervention?" 

"This is entirely coincidental," Fury nodded. "I'm in the wind myself. Though I have to admit I've been meaning to get a hold of you. It's how I know Barton hasn't been changing diapers since Monday." He cast her a curious look. "Rogers claims he doesn’t know where you are. Do I want to know what you're up to?" 

"Tell you if I knew myself," she said, looking out of the window, fingernails scratching into the napkin in front of her. "Chasing nightmares and ghosts, from the looks of it. Not heeding the advice I keep giving to Steve, in any case."

The grim look on Fury's face told her he had understood, and she grimaced in reply, lifting her cup for another sip. 

"Rogers went through every HYDRA base y’all could find across the effing globe," Fury pointed out, disapproval in his voice. "He didn't even come up with a _cold_ trail. And there was nothing in the ledger you dug up that led anywhere." 

"Mmh," Natasha said, glancing around the cafe before pulling up her shoulders and moving a little across the table. Her voice was low. "I might have an informant he didn't have." Which was, technically, a joke considering just how little she had to go on, but not exactly a lie compared to what Steve knew.

"Natasha!" Fury hissed, falling silent when she glared at him. 

"Not that it makes much of a difference. As I said, I'm chasing ghosts." 

"So why do it?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "Just... Gut feeling. Something's out there. No - more like... the absence of something, and I can't shake the feeling that it's something big. Someone in this world knows more than we do." She paused, eyes boring into Fury's. "I'm not sure Steve would be ready for what I could find." 

"And you are?" 

"I guess I'll find out when I’m there."

Fury didn't look happy, but nodded. "He won't hear it from me. I don’t need him to give me his ‘I’m disappointed in you, son’ look again." 

"Well," Natasha smiled, emptying her coffee. "Who knows if I find anything at all."

"I assume this means you won't stick around, then," Fury said, not quite finished with his own coffee. 

"No. I have reason to believe that HYDRA was inside the KGB and interior ministry just like they were inside SHIELD." She looked down at her napkin, where she’d absent-mindedly scratched the broken heart into the paper with the edge of her fingernail. She traced the outline, deepening the image. "If there were no records with SHIELD, or HYDRA itself, then maybe I'll find them there. If not, then... I’ll check out the HYDRA base we levelled outside Moscow again, at least.” There was no need to tell him of Jessica, and her very own reasons for going through the place again. 

Fury frowned and pulled the napkin out from under her hand. He studied the sign for a moment, then raised an eyebrow in question. 

"I found dozens of them carved into a stone wall by an abandoned building in Kazakhstan, and in a handful of old HYDRA bases we cleared out," she explained, watching his fingers trace the lines, and eventually shaking her head. "I can find no record of it anywhere. I went to the base in Romania and someone cleared out the vault it led me to, Nick. Recently." 

If Fury was disturbed by this, which he really should have been, she was surprised to see that his face didn’t show it. Instead, his gaze was fixated on the napkin.

"I’m not helping you on this, officially. I have no interest whatsoever in giving the dying thing another shot. But... my guess is SHIELD doesn't have information on this," he said slowly, after a sip of coffee, "because for all I know that file was closed before SHIELD was even founded."

"What do you mean?"

"I've seen this before, on a stack of dusty-ass manila envelopes," Fury said slowly, folding down the corner with the symbol to study it closer and holding it up to his face. "After Howard Stark died."

Natasha’s face didn’t show the frown in her voice when she heard Stark’s name. 

"Are you telling me that Stark might be connected to this?" 

"No," Fury shook his head. "At least I don’t think so. But after Stark Senior’s death, Director Carter and Stark's butler cleared out Stark's private vaults. He'd kept parts of old SSR and SHIELD archives in storage for years, and after he was gone some of his tech and blueprints were deemed too dangerous to fall into the wrong hands, especially after the Vanko debacle. Tony Stark was away at boarding school, or something, and never knew a thing about it. Standard relocation procedure, quick and quiet, I was there. Rookie days." He grinned and Natasha lifted an eyebrow in amusement. 

“I was young once! You, of course, wouldn’t remember. I even still had hair on my head.” Fury turned pensive again. "Some of that stuff we moved out that vault dated back to the SSR and the wars, probably never got digitalised. Not with the Cold War going on, and the time it took to do it back then. By the time there was time to catch up on the backlog, the world wasn't the same anymore."

"Where are the files now? Do they still exist?" Natasha asked, watching Fury count money out of his pocket, as if the conversation was over. 

She continued to stare at him, even as he paid for their coffees, and eventually he sighed and took the napkin. 

"I got to be honest with you, I’m not sure. This whole thing... I’m not happy about it, and I think you’re being reckless and irresponsible. And I have sources still to protect.” 

“I’m not asking for an address,” Natasha clarified. “I’m asking for the files.” 

“Did you just listen to me?” 

“Did you listen to _me_?” She asked, leaning further across the table. “You owe me, Nick. And if not me, then Steve. And most definitely Barnes, who was right under your nose for decades with Pierce pulling his strings like a puppet master.” 

It was a dick move to pull, and she knew it. Fury knew it too, but eventually rolled his eye. 

“Fine. I'll see what I can do'" he groused. She could tell he was calculating in his head. "But it’ll cost you and I’ll need some time. Say, 8 days. But not here.”

“I don’t know where I’ll be in eight days,” Natasha replied. “I’ll let you know.”

“Better not make me come to Russia, or you’ll owe me another one. A really big one.” 

 

The first thing Natasha heard when the door to the safehouse closed behind her was the crash of china, and she peered around the corner into the small kitchen, where Barnes stood by the sink breathing hard and staring down at the remnants of a plate, both hands gripping the countertop, whose laminate top was cracked with the force of his grip. Shards of porcelain were sticking out from under his fingers. Jessica sat by the table, looking tense.

"I suppose we can just pour some dishwashing agent in," Clint was saying, sounding like he was having an agitated discussion all by himself, bending over the open dishwasher and pulling a fork out from under Barnes' other hand. "Did you work this thing yesterday, Jess? How do I get this working?" 

He seemed oblivious to the frustration on Barnes' face, apparently busy studying the buttons on the machine. 

"Express? Express. If they break, they break, right? Not like we bought them with actual money," Clint concluded, pushing some more buttons and spotting Natasha in the door as he straightened up. 

"What's up?" she asked, voice neutral, holding up the shopping bags. "I come bearing gifts." 

"I'll be in the shower," Jess said, grabbing the box of tampons and the shampoo out of the bag before disappearing into the bathroom. Barnes hadn't moved, but gave off the distinct impression of a frustrated, caged animal. 

"I was about to... make tea," Clint said, perhaps a notch too cheerfully. 

"Sounds good," Natasha replied, putting the bags onto the counter before taking Jess' seat by the table. 

"What about you, man?" Clint asked Barnes, who took a second before he nodded sharply and slowly shuffled towards the table. He sat down when Clint's back was turned and Natasha was looking elsewhere. 

“We can’t put off the Moscow trip any longer,” Natasha said casually, taking the cup of tea Clint handed her a couple of minutes later. Barnes looked alarmed, but continued to stare into space. He was listening, then. Of course he was. “I have everything to get our papers done tonight, and the congress is the best cover we’ll get in the foreseeable future.” She paused. “If I leave for St. Petersburg tomorrow night, we should be able to make it.” 

“Huh, you’re the boss,” Clint huffed into his tea. He eyed Barnes for a second, then cast a look at Natasha before clearing his throat. “So, there goes my plan of a full beard. Goatee then; I’ve been clean-shaved on too many missions recently.” He nodded at Barnes. “How do you feel about a makeover, man?”

“Photo op in two hours”, Natasha said as she got up to put her shopping away. Barnes hadn’t touched his tea, but he followed her movements with his eyes. 

 

When Natasha put the finishing touches on Barnes’ fake passport, it was long past midnight and the small safe house was dark and quiet. The man in the photograph looked even more like a stranger than before. 

She’d worried about how Barnes would react to having someone move about his head with a sharp object, but Clint, amazingly, seemed to have an odd nerve when it came to the Winter Soldier. Maybe because he hadn’t seen him in action yet. But Barnes had sat still on the side of the bathtub, following Clint’s every move through the mirror in his hand, while Clint had chatted away quietly, hands steady and movements swift and practical. He’d trimmed his beard slightly and cut the split ends of Barnes’ hair to take the fugitive edge off his rugged look.

“Brought you this,” Clint said when he sat down beside her, putting a can of beer and a small, black earpiece onto the table. 

Natasha picked up the commlink and turned it over in her hands with a bittersweet feeling of melancholia tugging at her heart. It was practically vintage tech compared to Avengers equipment, and they hadn’t used it in years; in fact, Natasha hadn’t even known that Clint still had it. 

“Do they even still work?” The outline of an eagle was engraved in it, closed in by the three sides of a triangle. Three sides, three comms, the Greek letter delta. 

“Yeah, they do,” Clint said, taking his own out of his pocket. “You know, so you don’t always have to get kidnapped by Ultron or break a perfectly good radio just to call me on our secret spy channel.” 

Natasha huffed and shook her head, grinning. 

“Where’s the third one?” she asked, cringing when she realised what she’d said, but Clint shrugged, seemingly unaffected. 

“Back home with Laura. In case she wants me to buy milk on my way back.” 

“Or to remind you that she and the kids are lactose-intolerant.” 

“Pietro isn’t,” Clint objected. 

“Which one?” 

“Ah,” Clint hissed, eyes sparkling. “Now that’s the question, isn’t it?” 

Natasha leaned back and tried to work out the kink in her back from forging 4 sets of papers to get each of them into Russia. Ever since SHIELD had bled all over the internet, “undercover” had acquired a whole new meaning.

“So how’s he enjoying Iowa, then? Recovering well?” 

“Better when Wanda isn’t there to call him every dirty word in the book for getting himself killed. I swear, at some point he probably wished his cells weren’t so fast at regenerating. Oh, and by the way,” he added, nudging Natasha. “Steve says hi, and he wants me to let you know that Wanda has promised to teach him all the Sokovian swear words while you are gone, and that he’ll be fluent before you even reach conversational.” 

Natasha took a moment to roll her eyes, then sobered up and glared at Clint. 

“You told Steve about this?” 

Clint mock-glared right back at her. 

“He actually texted me a day and a half before your call came through. The good Captain is a smart cookie. He didn’t ask, either.” 

Good, sweet, caring Steve. Natasha smiled, suddenly flustered and a little humbled by the trust it implied. Maybe she’d become predictable, maybe he knew her too well these days. Maybe that was also a good thing. 

“In fact,” Clint continued, clearing his throat and then lowering his voice. “I didn’t ask, either, but _what the fuck, Nat_? What exactly am I even doing here? I mean, I can give a man a haircut without asking questions, but why exactly are we smuggling the Winter Soldier into Russia?” 

Natasha looked at the door to the living room for a while, listening in the darkness for signs that either Barnes or Jess were still awake, but it remained quiet. Barnes didn’t really sleep much, but even he couldn’t go on forever. 

Finally, she sighed and got up to drop herself on the couch instead. 

“Honestly, I don’t know. I just...” She looked at Clint for a while, “If it had been you, if he’d come to you, would you have said no?” 

“Yeah!” Clint whispered back urgently, then cringed. “He’s dangerous, Nat. I mean what if he freaks out? What are you gonna do, sing him a lullaby?” 

Natasha’s mouth hardened and Clint looked at least a little guilty. It had been a low blow, even though it didn’t exactly hurt. 

“So, you think I should have called it in to Steve?” she snapped, trying her utmost to keep her voice down. She looked past Clint and pointed towards where Barnes was - probably - sleeping in another room. “You think this is something Steve would handle?”

“No. Fuck,” he sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I’m sorry. But this... this isn’t your fight, Nat. Even if the KGB was involved, it’s not on you.” He tilted his head when she took a breath to interrupt him. “Ah, you’re doing it all for Steve, sure.” 

She glared at him and his face softened. 

“You were on a solo mission already. What’s eating you, Natasha?” His eyes were sharp, but not unkind. 

Natasha was quiet for a long time, finishing up their papers and putting them in a stack. Clint didn’t move, only shifted his legs a little after a while. 

“I don’t know,” she started, and raised her hand to shut Clint up when he looked like he was going to tell her to fuck off. “I really don’t. I’ve just been feeling... restless. Like I’m running out of... time, somehow.” 

She nudged her toes under his butt for warmth and he shifted to accommodate her. Her smile was a little watery.

“I have been a lot of things to a lot of people,” she continued quietly. “And it was all right. At the end, who I really was was the sum of my actions and choices.” 

“We all are,” Clint muttered, and he reached out for her hand, squeezing. Natasha squeezed back. 

“But mine no longer belong to me. I gave them up for the whole world to see and judge, and now I’m left only with what they see. I don’t regret what I did,” she added. “That was my choice, too, and it had to be done. And I know in the end I also chose to stay. I could’ve left, with Bruce, or by myself, but instead I decided not to.” She paused, wanting Clint to say something. He didn’t, though, and she hated him a little for not letting her off the hook. 

“And part of me maybe hoped that that would be enough to eventually really become the person who makes all of these choices.” 

Clint swallowed hard around a lump in his throat, and Natasha released his hand, wrapping her arms around herself instead. 

“But I’m not,” she finished. “I try, and there are days when I believe it. I’m not who I was before, if I was anyone at all, but at the same time I also can’t not be. So in the end there will always be a part of me that doesn’t belong.” 

“Nat-” Clint began, looking like he was searching for words, his voice gentle. “You know, I’m... I’m not sure you belong less than anyone else. I don’t think belonging is... all that constant, really.” He took her hand and squeezed her fingers. “But what I do know? Is that making the choices you made... that takes heart that I’m still not sure I would’ve had in your place. And it makes you brave in a way no-one could fake. That was you, all you. That’s not something that goes away.” 

Natasha looked at him for a long moment, watching his hand curl over her knee, thumb rubbing gently. 

“Has anyone heard from Bruce?” she changed the subject back to something that hurt considerably less. Although Bruce had been a part of it, too. The hope that there was a way of choosing who she could be, choosing to be connected to someone who might understand. 

Clint shook his head.

“No. Though I can tell you that at least half of our friends think that it’s him you went after. I think Steve worries more than he lets on.” 

“Steve is too sweet for his own good. It’s why you’re here and he’s not,” Natasha said, grinning humourlessly. Clint snorted. 

“I’m not sure it’s his cuddly side that worries. Guess what the Captain needs to know is whether or not you’d trust Bruce if he had to lead you both into battle as part of the team.” 

“Would you trust Phil?” she asked and Clint pursed his lips. It was the name they didn’t say anymore, the name that had hovered above them ever since Clint had dropped the old commlink onto the table. They’d never really spoken about it after the news had broken that Phil Coulson was alive. Natasha knew that each of them had on their own realised slowly, over the course of months maybe, that, dead or alive, Phil wasn’t going to come back for them. 

“Would I rely on him to save me?” Clint spoke slowly, deliberately. “Yes. I would.” 

“Yes,” Natasha said too, then paused. “Would I rely on him to save you, or Sam, or Wanda?” 

Clint released the breath he’d been holding in a bitter huff of air, and Natasha’s features hardened ever so slightly. 

“No.”


	6. Enemy at the Gates

Moscow airport was abuzz with hundreds of languages, the beeping of equipment, the rattling of loose suitcase wheels, the screaming of children. 

Natasha wrinkled her nose at her own body odour as she slouched against a wall in the Arrivals area, earplugs turned up and head nodding to a beat while she stared at the screen of her cell phone. Everyone gave her a subtle berth. It was Clint’s Axe effect, and if she’d ever been grateful for it, it was now. 

The security feed she’d tapped into with her phone showed her the baggage claim area and security. Their flight had landed precisely 62 minutes and 46 seconds ago and the plan was timed to the fraction of a minute in order to work - had to be because of Barnes, or perhaps for the sake of her own nerves. 

There he was, on her tiny screen, hair both tousled and styled, beard trimmed into what Jess had called farmer’s market hip. It changed the shape of his face, though, and the large scarf wrapped around his neck optically slimmed his shoulders down. He moved stiffly, though Natasha noticed that it was everyone else’s kind of stiff, the stiff that said ‘crammed into a plane for too long’. He was blending in perfectly with all the other hipsters, start-up heroes and economic superheroes that had come for an international convention that was attracting people from all over the globe. They had been lucky with their timing. 

Natasha shifted her weight and sniffed loudly, wiping her nose into her sleeve, while Barnes approached the security gate to offer his passport and visa. 

Barnes smiled politely and frowned just a little in concentration when he was being talked to by the security officer. A seemingly idiosyncratic nervous hand gesture accompanied his reply, as if he was hurrying his brain to find the right words. Then he smiled. 

Huh. He was actually good. He actually just followed the plan, but follow it he did, to the letter. 

When he approached the full body scanner, Natasha switched to a different camera feed, just in time to see Clint drop his laptop onto the floor three security lines down and turning heads all around. It was a split second of distraction, and Jessica, who had manned the station adjacent to the one Barnes had lined up for a shift change twenty-five minutes prior, clad in an airport security uniform, disrupted the scanner’s signal with a casual touch of her wrist watch to the surface as Barnes walked through. He collected his papers on the other side, suppressing a yawn and nodding goodbye to the security person. 

Natasha smiled. Down without a hitch. 

Barnes continued to make his way out of the airport, collecting his bag and exiting into the arrivals hall. He looked around for a bit, purposely not seeing the short and fat taxi driver right away who held up a sign with his cover name, wearing a shabby sports suit. 

The taxi driver took his suitcase off him and walked him outside to where his taxi stood in a long line of cars. 

“Think I’m in the mood for a ride,” Barnes said in fluent Russian once they had both gotten in, and Natasha turned around in her seat, which was a lot harder than usual inside the fatsuit. She wiped the stringy hair of her ash blonde wig out of her face with a gloved hand.

“Seatbelts on,” she smiled, and just like that the mission was accomplished, and the cover slid off his face and was replaced by the brooding alertness in his eyes that left nothing of the young man alive that had exited the airport a minute earlier. When he’d looked slightly travel-worn before, there was now bone-deep exhaustion of someone who barely slept and never rested, not even when he was perfectly still. 

“Clint and Jess are going to get out within the hour,” she said, voice all business, and she could see him lift his chin in the rear-view mirror as they drove away from the airport. “I’ll drop you off at the hotel, then use this disguise to get supplies, and then move on to the safehouse.” She paused. The sentence ‘do you remember how to get there’ was on her lips, but she stopped herself, realising that of course he knew. This was a mission, after all. 

 

“Can’t be long now,” Natasha muttered into her earpiece, taking her seventh selfie in front of the Kremlin that morning. “Do you see her?” 

“No, not yet,” Clint replied from another corner of the square. People were milling about them, taking pictures, so many pictures. If any of them went unrecognised, it’d be a fucking miracle. 

Natasha glanced up to the roof of a nearby building, where Barnes was surveilling the scene and watching over all of them. He had a gun with a single blank shot - to warn them or call for help. 

“We’re all going in unarmed,” she’d said, reading from his eyes that he knew it was a lie, but accepting it anyway, “We can’t risk any one of us being stopped by police and searched. It happens.” 

“Yes,” he’d said, in Russian, and that had been it. 

“ _I’m two streets away_ ,” Jess said when Natasha picked up the call. “ _He left the house like clockwork, but there’s a crowd that’s slowing everything down_.” 

“I can see him,” Natasha said, eyes on the elderly man that shuffled onto the square behind a gaggle of tourists. 

He didn’t look as old as she’d imagined he would. It felt like ages ago to her, but he didn’t move with difficulty, his back wasn’t bent under his years or the weight of his choices, and his eyes as he looked around the square were sharp. 

Natasha slipped behind a group of people when he looked her way. Would he recognise her? The last two remnants of the Red Room, meeting in front of the Kremlin. He had to be close to eighty, she realised; he had been old when she’d defected, and all the other old men that had still been there at the time were no longer alive. 

She made her way through the crowds, half circling him, staying aware of Clint’s movements as he walked to join Jess. The old man didn’t look at anyone, but kept looking ahead.

He was so close.

What would she say? Was there a greeting for these kinds of occasions? 

She was about twenty feet away from him when their eyes finally met, and for a split second the air felt electric with recognition. 

Just then she felt her own heartbeat heavy in her chest, and his movements stuttered, grey eyes cold as steel. Of course he knew her. They’d know each other anywhere.

You’ll never be rid of me, Natasha thought, irrationally, as if he could hear her. I’ll be there when you die.

She’d said these words to him, in a former life, and maybe he was remembering them in this moment same as her. 

A loud bang tore through the moment and Natasha’s head jerked up towards the roof where Barnes was situated. It took a split second for her to realise what had happened and see, from the corner of her eyes, how Aleksandr Lukin crumbled to the ground. Blood was trickling from the hole in his brow, and _Barnes only had one blank_. 

“Natasha, get out of there!” Clint was yelling through the comm in her ear and she let herself be swept off by the mindlessly panicking civilians around her, blood rushing in her ears, while everybody was hurrying to find cover as soon as possible, in case the shooter wasn’t done yet. 

It couldn’t have been Barnes, she realised with a creeping sense of horror, it had been someone else.

The explosion that shook the earth seconds later threw her off balance and she flung herself to the ground behind the nearest solid obstacle that would provide cover and shielded her head with her arms. Her ears were ringing when she got back up, dazedly scanning the area for damage, casualties and police force. She could hear police cars and ambulances approach through the dull throbbing in her head. They were damned fast. 

“We need to move right now or we’re screwed,” Clint said, suddenly beside her and tugging at her elbow. “Steve will kill us if word gets out that we’re here.” 

Natasha snapped back into the moment. He was right. They had about ten minutes until the press arrived, if that. It might be too late already.

She pulled her beanie deeper into her forehead, watching Clint do the same to his hoodie, and their steps quickened as the square around them got louder. They were almost running by the time the police started to close in on the area, commanding people to remain calm and stay where they were over speakers. 

Jess fell into their arms when they left the square and rounded the next corner. 

“You okay?” Clint asked and she nodded, looking frantic.

“Where is Barnes?” Natasha demanded and Jess looked from her to Clint and back, seemingly in shock.

“Where is he?” Clint asked, too, looking worried now. 

Jess leaned to glance around the corner and nodded down the street. 

“In pursuit.” 

“Shit,” Natasha blurted out, grabbing Jessica’s shoulders and giving her a shake. “Which way? Jess, _which way?_ ” 

Jess swallowed, then shook her head as if to clear it. 

“He went down the street, two blocks, then took a right. There was someone getting away across the roofs in that general direction.” 

“We need to find him,” Natasha replied, looking around for a vehicle. “How much advance does he have on us?” 

Clint, in the meantime, was busying himself with hotwiring a nearby parked motorcycle. 

“He left the roof when the shot was fired. I think he saw the shooter. When the explosion hit, he took off. So... I don’t know, maybe ten, fifteen minutes, max?” 

“Shit,” Natasha repeated, jerking around when Clint started the motor. 

“Hop on.” 

“Wait, what do I do?” Jess asked and Clint tossed her his phone. 

“Find us a car. Then find us. My phone can track Nat’s.” He looked over his shoulder and Natasha nodded that she was ready. “Right, let’s go.” 

They belted down the street in the direction Jess had indicated, dodging yet more arriving police cars and other official vehicles, and Natasha prayed to whoever was listening that nobody would get the idea to follow them. The Winter Soldier, Hawkeye and the Black Widow fleeing the scene of an explosion was the stuff that made headlines globally. 

“How do we find him? Did you bug him?” Clint yelled back at her and Natasha tried to both pull her phone out of her jacket and not fall off the bike when Clint swerved to avoid pedestrians. 

“You think I’m an amateur, Barton?” she yelled back, pressing buttons on her phone with one hand while holding on to Clint with the other. “Come on, come on,” she muttered at her phone, willing the small dot on the map to stop blinking and settle on a target. “Got it! Two streets down, then left, then right!” 

“Dude, that asshole can fucking sprint!” Clint hit the gas some more and Natasha’s beanie and wig were swept off her head. She didn’t turn to look; it wasn’t like she was ever going to need them again. 

“Let’s hope he doesn’t keep running much longer because this thing will be out of gas sooner than we’ll want,” Clint informed her and she squeezed his side affirmatively. 

They were catching up on Barnes slowly – Clint hadn’t been wrong, the guy was running on Steve levels of insane - trying to catch him and cut him off at the next best occasion, when it hit Natasha that they weren’t just chasing Barnes. 

They were chasing the person who had known they’d be there on the Red Square today, who had shot their target before they could reach it, who had known that it was him they had been waiting for. Because the man certainly had had more than enough enemies, but he walked the same route every morning. That would have to be one hell of a coincidence. 

Her heart was suddenly hammering in her ears despite the roaring of the motorbike.

The dot on the phone got closer and closer, and Natasha was beginning to look around. 

“Turn right!” she told Clint, pointing with her hand to where she saw Barnes run. “Up on the roof!” 

“Got it!” Clint tore the bike around to make the corner, only to start cursing when the motor began to cough at them. “FUCK THIS BLOODY FUCKING THING, COME ON!” 

“Never mind, just run!” she replied, already sliding off the bike and making for where Barnes was headed. She tried to follow his gaze, tried to see what he saw, where he was running-

She spotted the shooter, a hundred metres ahead, clad in black combat gear, slipping off the side of a building, landing and rolling before lunging on, rifle slung across the shoulder. He sprinted on down the street, well in her sight, until he vanished into a derelict building off the side of the street. 

“SOLDIER!” she yelled in Russian when Barnes hit the street ahead of her, his fist coming down on the street and cracking the asphalt. If they were doing this, they had to go in together. “HALT, SOLDIER! THIS IS AN ORDER!”

She could see how the words tore him out of his momentum, like invisible strings that pulled him back and that he wanted to throw his weight into. 

It was almost terrifying to watch how he suddenly stopped... everything. 

“Barnes, we need to do this together, okay?” she said when she reached his height, almost - almost - daring to touch his arm, but reconsidering. He looked tense and indescribably dangerous. “This was a hit on _us_ , not on Lukin. We can’t risk running into a trap.” 

Maybe for the first time since they had met, he looked her directly in the eyes and, reluctantly, nodded. 

“Man, what are you, like, the captain of assassin sprinting club?” Clint came up beside them, hands stemmed in his sides and looking pained as he contemplated the building ahead. “Aw, no, stairs too?” 

“How do you know?” Natasha asked as they moved closer. “I would have thought he just left through the back.” 

“Nah, he went up the stairs,” Clint said with conviction. He pointed at his face. “The name is Hawk _eye_. It’s because _Eye_ am good at the seeing thing.”

Barnes _snorted_.

Natasha, who had been about to say something snappy, fell silent. There was no sign of amusement on the Winter Soldier’s face when she glanced at him, and for a moment she thought she’d imagined it. A look at Clint told her she hadn’t. 

“But you didn’t see that one coming,” she muttered at him when they took cover behind a line of garbage containers. 

“Shut up,” he mouthed, glancing over the top of the containers before turning back towards them. “Okay, so how do we do this?” 

 

As derelict as the building looked, Natasha realised with a glance at the letterboxes that it was still inhabited. Not all of the apartments, but some of them. Sneaking up to the first floor, she nodded at Barnes, who had climbed in through an open window at the back, and pointed upwards. 

“The cellar is clear,” Clint reported when he joined them. 

The sound of a window breaking somewhere above them put an end to their sneaking. Bolting up the stairs, Barnes went ahead, kicking in an old door with chipped off green paint and barging into the flat.

Natasha and Clint found him seconds later, staring out the open window and searching the backyard, then the adjacent roofs, then the sky for signs of the shooter. The way he whirled around to stare at them in frustration told Natasha all she needed to know, and she sighed, shoulders slowly sagging in defeat. 

“Shit.” 

“Sh, quiet,” Clint interrupted, listening. 

There was a sound in the next room, the scratching of a chair across the old floor, the whispering of fabric. 

A cracked and high-pitched cry died in the throat of the old lady when they stepped into what looked like her bedroom. She was in bed, a blanket across her lap, bony old fingers gripping the fabric tight. The skin on the back of her hands looked thin and almost see-through, peppered with spots and blemishes. Her blue eyes were wide and fearful and she cowered into the corner when she saw Barnes’ hand. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Natasha spoke to her, drawing her eyes away from Barnes and onto her instead. “We didn’t mean to disturb you. We mean you no harm. But we heard your window break.” 

“Is everything all right with you, ma’am?” Clint asked when she didn’t answer. 

“I... someone came in. I was asleep,” she stuttered eventually. “You can take what you want, you can have everything...!”

“We’re not here to hurt you or to take anything,” Natasha said quickly, gently, walking over and bending down by the bed. She straightened the blanket across the old woman’s lap a bit and smiled at her. “We just want to make sure you’re okay. Did you see who it was who came in?” 

“No,” the woman shook her head. “I thought it might be my granddaughter, but she has a key! But then window broke! And the door, it was so loud!”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Natasha said. “I’m sure we can get it fixed.” She made a mental note to tell Tony to buy the building and renovate, or something... 

“My granddaughter, she would never make such noise,” the woman continued, rambling now, but grabbing Natasha’s hand. “She’s so graceful, you know. She got accepted to the Bolshoi.” 

“That is wonderful. You must be proud.” 

“And are you a ballerina too, ma’am? Surely you must be,” Clint threw in, his charm every bit as horrifying in Russian as it was in English, or any other language. He’d been looking at some of the framed photographs on the woman’s wall, most of them fading and dusty on the top.

The old woman giggled, though, which was good. Barnes looked tense, standing next to the window and glaring outside, eyes searching. 

“Are you a friend of my little girl?” the woman asked Natasha suddenly, as if she’d forgotten all about what had happened, still petting her hand. “Is that why you’re here? You’re also in the Bolshoi?” 

“No, I-” Was all Natasha could say before she jumped up and jerked her arm out of pure instinct, blocking the sudden blow of Barnes’ hand. “Barnes, what-” His second hit missed her by less than an inch, and only because Clint was already on top of him, trying to hold him back from going berserk in an eighty year old woman’s bedroom. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Clint pressed out, trying to get his arm around Barnes’ neck and lock his head. Barnes growled and his metal arm hit Clint in the gut full force, blowing him off his back and against the wall. Clint crumpled to the ground retching and coughing, and Natasha would have felt sorry for him, if she hadn’t been busy driving Barnes out of the room and away from innocent pensioners. 

Barnes barely seemed to feel her boot in his knee or solar plexus, or notice that he had gone flying and landed on a living room table made of glass that had shattered all around him. It was like the tension in his shoulders had finally snapped, and he came swinging at Natasha with wild eyes, with anger and pain set deep in his face, and Natasha was suddenly relieved that he didn’t have a gun. 

The old woman had started wailing again, and she could hear Clint groaning. Dodging another blow and jerking off her jacket for better movement, and to uncover her widow’s bite, she called out, mind racing for a plan,

“Clint, get her out, you heaghrrr-” 

Gasping for breath as Barnes grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off the ground, her reflexes took over. He foot shot out, kicking where it hurt, while her widow’s bite hit just above his heart, and her throat was free again. She breathed once, twice, eyes never off of Barnes, who was struggling to stay on his feet, stumbling backwards over to the window and falling against the broken frame. He snarled, and his hand closed around a shard of glass that was lying on the windowsill. 

Fine. Bandages off, then. 

It had been a while since she’d been up against an equal, and a mean one at that. Barnes was fast, efficient, and ruthless, and it was mostly because she remembered the way he moved that she knew how to counter his blows and stay out of the way of his metal arm without getting her eyes poked out by the blade in his human one. 

“For fuck’s sake, Barnes,” she pressed out between hits, successfully blocking his way back into the bedroom, where Clint had apparently collected his pieces enough to pick up the old woman. 

All Natasha had to do was clear the way. 

“Count to ten,” she yelped at Clint, smashing her fist as hard against Barnes’ neck as she could to shove him away and bring some distance between them. 

She calculated her angles. 

Flex and go. 

It was a lousy enough day for even lousier fucking plans that could get her killed - if Barnes didn’t get there first, that was. 

Jumping and propelling herself off the opposite wall she threw herself onto Barnes and they went out of the window, falling free. 

 

She assumed that, subconsciously, some part of her brain had probably realised that they were going to land on a large pile of junk behind the building, and not hard concrete. None of her bones cracked, there was no stabbing sensation anywhere in her body, but the impact still paralysed her for a long, dreadful second, during which her vision whited out. It returned just in time for her to see the shadow of a metal arm coming punching her way, and she rolled to the side and slid off the pile of old furniture, cardboard and garbage, and onto solid ground. 

When Barnes jumped after her, his movements were sloppy and his balance just slightly off. Natasha used the next opening in his defence to zing him in the chest with her widow’s bite again. Her own balance wasn’t what it usually was, either. 

His human fist connected with her jaw enough for her to splutter blood onto the pavement. 

Well, staying out of range of the metal arm wasn’t everything. 

They were running out of time, though. Sirens were already howling in the distance, and Natasha was aware that with every passing minute the chance for their presence to go public increased. Even if they were in a lonely backyard in a shitty part of Moscow.

It was this knowledge that urged her forward. She was fighting as dirty as she could now; screw all the above-board nonsense Steve had them all train in. The Winter Soldier knew all that, met her every move, and she didn’t have the raw strength to just beat him into submission. 

He stumbled back when she came back at him unexpectedly, changing the rhythm of their blows and going all out on the offence. She was aware of her own openness, knew that if he landed one good blow in all of it she’d be out cold, if she was lucky. She could feel an echo sensation of her stingers rattling through his muscles, heard how his breath got knocked out of his lungs when her knee hit, and finally, finally, she saw his centre of gravity shift enough for her to slam him backwards onto the ground and hold him down with all of her body, one knee at his throat, her wristband set to send a steady stream of electricity through his metal arm. 

“JAMES!”

He was glaring at her like a madman, breath rattling laboriously and legs twitching helplessly on the ground behind her. She spat blood onto the ground nearby again, cringing at the taste in her mouth. 

“Barnes! Get a grip!” she hissed, struggling to keep him down and staring intently into his face until she caught his gaze. 

He looked terrified and confused and furious. 

“Barnes,” she repeated, “I want to help you. We’re on the same side. I need you to calm down!” 

His breath began to sound more like sobbing with every second, and Natasha wished that she could trust him enough to loosen her grip on him. 

“We need to complete this mission,” she said instead, calming her voice as much as possible. “And we need to get out of here and regroup. We need a new plan, but first I need you to calm down. If you don’t, then there is no way we will ever find what we’ve been looking for!” 

His legs had stopped kicking, and he was making a visible effort to breathe more steadily. 

“I’m going to release your throat now,” Natasha muttered, faintly hearing the sounds of Clint’s footsteps somewhere behind them. He’d be armed, it was a small comfort. She moved her knee off Barnes’ throat. He didn’t move, only continued to stare up at her, swallowing a couple of times. 

“What happened in there?” she asked, still focused on Barnes, who shook his head. 

“I don’t know,” he said, in Russian.

“We need to leave,” Clint said, stepping up to them and looking around the area. Natasha followed his gaze, noticing Jessica move down from the roof across by crawling down the walls. It was such a handy skill to have. 

“Five big dudes have decided they’re too scared to find out what all the noise is,” Jess said. “You’re welcome.” 

“We got a car?” Natasha said, slowly moving to get off the Winter Soldier, who was staring straight up at the sky now. 

“We do,” Clint said, bending down to pull Barnes to his feet. He looked at Natasha for a second, then shook his head, looking back at Barnes. 

“Sorry, man. Can’t risk it.” His movement was swift; a single prick with a tiny needle, and Barnes collapsed on him like a sack of potatoes.


	7. Dead Man's Dream

“Urgh,” Natasha gargled through the freshly flowing blood in her mouth as she pulled two teeth from the back of her jaw. “And they were perfectly good and new, too...” She dumped them into the empty plastic cup that stood by the sink next to her and grabbed the nearby bottle of water to wash out her mouth. 

“I’ll add them to our collection, then?” Jess said warily, picking it up while taking away some of the bloodied wipes to flush them inside the single, smelly stall of the rest stop toilet. “You know, most people don’t get their third teeth until they’re much older.” 

“I think I had some of my third teeth already before I lost all of my first,” Natasha muttered in reply, wincing when Clint pressed an improvised ice pack to her face. “‘m fine!” 

“Shush,” he said, moving on to take stock of the bruises on her back and down her sides, quickly glancing to make sure the door had snapped shut after Jess had left. “Doesn’t look like anything’s broken, but I’ll give you some of the magical medicine juice anyway.” 

“We need to keep moving,” she reminded him when he pricked her with a needle and pushed a dose of classified liquid healing into her body. “All media are full of terror warnings by now; airports are out of the question, and if we don’t hurry up, all other ways out of the country will be too.” 

“Jess is already packing back up and getting some more food. Once I’m done here I’ll find us another license plate. But, uh...” 

Then there was the small matter of an unconscious super assassin in the back of their stolen storage van. 

“I’ll take care of Barnes,” she said, pulling down the hem of her shirt and shooing Clint’s hands away. Clint stepped back and watched her find her bearings for a moment. 

“I read the reports, you know,” he said. “I even watched some of the news footage. But seeing you two in action...” He whistled. “That was some next-level shit, Natasha. I’m not even kidding.” 

“You haven’t seen half of him,” she replied simply. It was true, too. Barnes hadn’t slept more than a handful of hours every two nights since he’d been with them, had been haunted by nightmares, and had pretty much only eaten when they’d made him. He was a far cry from the hyper-efficient tank she’d encountered in Washington DC. Which was half the reason she was spitting out teeth and not vertebrae.

“Well, as I found out today, I apparently haven’t seen half of you, either,” Clint just said, pressing a kiss to her hair before getting up and leaving the restroom. Natasha could hear him talk to Jess outside that he was going to be back in a bit. 

She left the restroom, ice pack in one hand, a shabby plastic bag with her things and her towel in the other, and nodded a thank you at Jess, who was already busy shifting the few bags and boxes that she’d grabbed from their safehouse on the way out from the front to the back seat, carefully avoiding the back of the van altogether. 

 

Barnes was unconscious for another hour after they took off again, lying on a blanket on the floor where Clint had laid him down on his back. Natasha had gotten in with him, sitting on a low crate and leaning back against Clint’s bag of dirty laundry, legs outstretched in front of her. She figured that his waking up alone in a moving van would probably only make things worse. 

For a long while she just sat, letting her face fall into the ice pack and closing her eyes, not thinking of anything in particular. The Dance of the Little Swans from Swan Lake came to her mind and she let herself drift a little. 

It might have been ten minutes after she’d checked her phone for the time when he finally stirred, breath hitching a couple of times before changing pace. He didn’t gasp awake as he so often did, only opened his eyes, body tensing. Glancing around the dark inside of the van, his eyes fell on her and she didn’t quite know how to react, only held out the ice pack to him after a moment of consideration. He was frowning, as if trying to remember. 

“Are you hurt?” Natasha asked eventually, speech a little slurred thanks to her swollen cheek, gaze darting up and down his body. There were no weird angles anywhere, and no blood down his front apart from a couple of scratches and cuts here and there. She hadn’t really been able to wound him.

“No,” he said quietly, sitting up and flinching away when Natasha made to move closer. The van hit a bump in the road and she let herself fall back again. He looked skittish, and she decided to avoid moving any closer to him by accident.

“I was just going to check your back, if you needed stitches or something. We have pretty decent recovery serum; it helps with bruises and overall ache. We gave you a shot of that earlier, but if you need another-”

“No needles,” he burst out, his eyes wide as he was flexing his muscles one by one, as if running a system check. When he took off his jacket, Natasha could see blood stains down his back. He had landed worse than she had. “No touching.”

It chilled her a little to hear the dead tone in his voice, and she had a vivid image of the Winter Soldier, post mission, being turned over by gloved hands like a machine. 

“All right, but you’re gonna be wanting to take a shower at the next stop,” she said. “I guess we’ll need one more fill up of the tank before we get across the border. We need to leave the country as soon as possible.” 

He looked at her, nodding, then paused, watching her tie her hair back with an elastic, exposing the bruise down the side of her face and neck. 

“I hurt you. How much?” His eyes were hard. She put the ice pack back, smirking at the flash of cold. 

“Considering my last two run ins with the Winter Soldier, this is nothing,” she shrugged. “I don’t even have bullet holes in my body to make it count.”

She wasn’t sure he’d accept the humour in her voice, but for a moment he didn’t look like he’d heard her at all. His face was motionless and he was staring into space, back stiff, the strangest look on his face. She tried her best to get a read on him, but could only guess. 

“Are you hurt?” she asked. “I’m sorry we didn’t ask you about the injection. And... sorry about knocking you out.”

“The Winter Soldier,” he repeated, features darkening, and she feared all of a sudden that she’d said the wrong thing. “That’s what they call me?”

She took a moment to grasp the implication of his words, the cold truth behind them. She kept her voice quiet and soft, but void of pity. Nothing was worse than pity. 

“Yes.” She contemplated him. “They didn’t call you that, did they?” 

“No,” he said curtly. “No, they didn’t call me anything. Someone-” he broke off, sounding a little like he already regretted not leaving it at that. He swallowed. “I guess I had names, other names. I... I don’t think I was always who they made me be in the end. But that was a long time ago.” 

“And now? What name do you want to have?”

“I don’t know.” He stared ahead at the inside of the back door for a while, then his shoulders twitched and he turned his head to glance at her before looking away again. “But don’t call me Winter Soldier.”

He moved and turned around on the blanket, feet slowly dragging across the ground past hers, flexing his ankles and calves. Technically, Clint’s anaesthetic should have kept him out cold for a day at least, but he was the type to shake things off when necessity required it. 

“Where are we going?” He asked, picking some dirt out from between the digits of the fingers of his left hand. He sounded distracted, and Natasha let herself fall back against the wall behind her. 

She felt a sudden, irrational wave of anger take her over, and she had to look away from him. For a moment, she despised him for everything he had brought on her, on all of them. There they were now, fleeing from a country that they weren’t allowed to be in in the first place, after yet another lead had turned out to be nothing but a dead end. And all she had to show for it was the general soreness and the pain in her jaw and the uncomfortable certainty that she was in too deep now to back out. 

“Hell if I know. Somewhere to regroup.” She swallowed down around the bitterness in her voice. “Lukin is dead, which means our hopes to find some actual information on the Red Room and any possible connections to HYDRA are also dead. We got fucking nothing. Jess is probably pissed because there’s no way we can get back to checking the Russian HYDRA base for clues now that the whole Russian Federation is on alert, and Clint... honestly, sometimes I don’t understand why he sticks around, when he doesn’t actually deserve any of this shit.” 

She ran out of breath and the rest of her rant hung in midair between them while the van continued to rumble around them, every ever so small bump in a road a hit to their bones.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a while, looking up at the ceiling, head tilted back against the wall. “I didn’t mean to... I don’t know what happened to me in that apartment. I couldn’t stop myself.” 

Natasha sighed and told herself not to feel like an ass. 

“It’s okay. You did stop in the end. And I’m not the only one who got hurt.” 

 

The car had been standing for quite a while by the time Clint threw open the back doors and harsh light flooded the cabin. Barnes, who had been tense ever since the engine had died, flinched and moved forward at the same time, every muscle tight and ready to attack. 

“Whoa, save it for the luggage,” Clint said, stepping back to let them both get out. “Car change. Time for pee pee and wet wipes, but we gotta be quick about this.” 

“We’re not in Russia anymore,” Natasha stated with a look at the writing around the deserted petrol station. It was the middle of the night and the lights were all the more garish for it.

“Nothing gets past you,” Clint replied with a smug grin, waving a towel at Barnes to cover his arm. “Jess is on her way to disable the security cameras. Once she’s back we need to make a quick run for the car back there,” - he gestured at the dark and dodgy parking spaces behind the petrol station - “before the cameras can come back up. Then we drive both cars for three miles and then ditch the van.” 

“Where are we going?” Barnes asked suddenly, his voice raspy. 

“West,” Barton replied. “Transia.” 

“We don’t know anyone in Transia,” Natasha remarked, trying to remember if there was a safe house she’d forgotten, and Clint grimaced, tossing his phone at her. She looked at the text message on the screen. 

“We will once we get to these coordinates,” Clint replied. “We might also have a safehouse. We’ll see.” 

 

The small black car stopped and pulled over on the other side of the street, lights going out. Natasha’s phone buzzed once. 

“You need to promise me, Barnes, that whatever happens, you will not break cover.”

It was really the shittiest idea they - or rather, Clint - had had so far, even Natasha had to admit. But he was right; the only worse idea would have been to stop anywhere for a chat. Transia was many things, but above all you met all kinds of people there. All kinds including the ones that might be hunting you for any random reason in the book. 

They were parked on the side of the road in the middle of a long forest stretch, Wundagore Mountain looming ahead of them. The moon was flickering in slow motion as clouds slipped past it, and it was just a tad too cold for her leather jacket when Natasha got out of the car. 

“I don’t like this,” she heard Jess say before she slammed the car door shut on the rest of her sentence. 

Hands shoved into her pockets, Natasha crossed the road and walked over to the tall figure that had gotten out of the other car. 

“Sorry we couldn’t meet anywhere cosier,” Natasha opened the conversation and even in the dim moonlight, Fury’s smirk was clearly visible. 

“I could have used a heads up on the location a bit more in advance,” he said, looking her up and down. 

“Yeah, sorry. We’ve been on the move. I assumed you wouldn’t want to meet up anywhere crowded, and we’re short on safehouses right now.” He didn’t reply immediately. The swelling on her face was almost gone, and she was pretty sure it was too dark to make out the remaining shades of the bruise. Or maybe not, judging by the disapproving look on his face. 

“So the situation in Russia,” he said, glancing past her at the car. “You wouldn’t know anything about Aleksandr Lukin being dead?” 

“I was there, but I didn’t kill him,” Natasha said. “Someone else did, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t the same someone else who’s been one step ahead of us all this time.” She shook her head. “Anything I should worry about? I’ve been tracking the news.” 

“Nothing on the news or off the news,” Fury said. “I haven’t heard from superhero central.” 

“No news is good news,” Natasha decided. 

“Not sure you’ll say so in a minute,” Fury said, reaching into the car through the open window to pick an Atlas off the back seat. “Honestly, I thought I’d be finding more than I did.” 

“Quality counts,” Natasha replied, taking the atlas from his hands and flipping it open. The inside of the book was cut out to hold a stack of papers and ledgers. It was the oldest trick in the book and in her head Clint was snickering at the double entendre. Trick in the book. 

“The symbol you saw was used by a covert intelligence agency during and shortly after the second world war. They called themselves Leviathan,” Fury supplied. “They spread some terror for a couple of years until about 1950; espionage, assassination, that sort of stuff. They were responsible for the death of some high-ranking SSR officials until Peggy Carter helped take down their leader.” 

“Links to HYDRA?” Natasha asked and Fury shook his head. 

“None that anyone suspected. HYDRA was dead at the time. Operation Paperclip wasn’t until years later. Chronologically they don’t overlap.”

“Doesn’t mean there’s no connection,” Natasha muttered, thumbing through the pages, unable to read most of the writing in the darkness. She closed the atlas. “I guess I owe you.” 

“Not for this,” Fury said, getting back into his car and switching on the engine. “For my silence on Lukin? Yes. Definitely.” 

He drove off in the opposite direction they were headed, and Natasha felt a strange tension creep up her shoulders when she approached their own waiting car. The air was thick when she got back into the back seat and met Clint’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. He raised an eyebrow and Natasha turned her head slowly, ignoring Jess’ stiff back in the passenger’s seat and instead looking into the shadows beside her. 

“We have a new lead,” she said, and Barnes’ inhaled audibly, breath shaking.

“I killed him,” he pressed out. “I... the mission was-” He breathed again. “I killed him!”

“Yeah, you did,” Natasha replied, trying to keep it as simple as possible. “It just didn’t stick. He does that. It’s not failure on your part, trust me.”

Barnes didn’t reply and Natasha put the atlas with their new intel on the seat between them as Clint turned the car back onto the road and drove on. 

“Are we still in the clear?” Clint asked casually. “Did he say anything?”

“As far as he knows,” Natasha replied and kicked her shoes off to pull her feet up onto the seat.

“So you guys weren’t kidding when you said Russia doesn’t like you,” Jess said and Clint snorted. 

“Understatement of the century. We’re officially forbidden from entering the country ever since we blew up their HYDRA bases searching for...” He paused, glancing at Nat through the rear-view mirror again and clearing his throat. “Y’know, just random stuff. Nothing to write home about.”

“That sounds convincing, coming from an Avenger. You’re not allowed in Russia; you’re not allowed in Latveria or Sokovia, you’re not ‘welcome’ in Wakanda, whatever that means...” Jess replied. “But you go anyway, so what’s the point?” 

“The point is,” Natasha threw in, “We break the rules when we must. But we really, really do not need the shitshow of being caught in a country we’re officially not allowed in.” 

“Steve would literally never speak to us again,” Clint added. “And man, you don’t want Captain America pissed at you, you just don’t. Note that down for the future if you ever think of disappointing Steve Rogers.” 

“Screw that, with some of the stuff that’s going on in the Russian government you can’t seriously tell me a couple of world leaders out there wouldn’t be backing you up.” Jess replied stubbornly. Natasha could tell that this was something she’d been bottling up for a while. “And hello, shouldn’t Captain America be the first in line to knock some Eastern European dictators off their asses? Freedom and shit?” 

Clint inhaled sharply, but didn’t say anything else. Barnes had gone entirely quiet and didn’t give any sign of listening at all, so Natasha sighed and shook her head. 

“It’s not that simple.” When Jess made a derisive sound, Natasha’s voice got sharper. “It’s _isn’t_. Actions have consequences, and ever since the Avengers are officially no longer under SHIELD legislation with the WSC to take the heat for our crap, those rules have become a whole edge more complicated. Enough people already want us disbanded and locked up.” She shifted in her seat and leaned forward, closer to Jess, who was eyeing her from the corner of her eye. “You know what it’s called, barging into a country like Latveria, which is currently at peace, and just toppling a dictatorship that has brought its people an unequalled economic upswing, wealth that it hasn’t seen in hundreds of years, and put it at the forefront of scientific advance and technological research? Terrorism.” 

“Doom is a maniac,” Jess said. 

“But it’d still be terrorism for us to openly disrespect his authority. Same with Russia – if anyone gets wind that Clint and I were even inside the country when a decorated KGB officer was assassinated in broad daylight, it’s going to be an international shitstorm. Russia might weigh in on NATO to declare war against the Avengers. Stark Industries employs thousands of people. Clint has a family, the Falcon is a US veteran, the twins are technically illegal immigrants and already have terrorism on their record, just... Steve is not stupid, or blind. He knows what he’s doing, and what he’s not doing.” 

Jess fell silent. Natasha fell back into her seat and suddenly had to fight a yawn. Barnes was still, and she wanted nothing as much as sleep now. It was exhausting even to argue the point with Jess, especially since she herself had argued about it with Steve at times. Or maybe not quite argued, but discussed, usually because quarrelling with Steve was easier sometimes, than to keep listening to the news anchors reporting on all the ways the world was horrible. 

She didn’t know when exactly she dozed off, but when she blinked next, Clint and Jess were talking in low voices about Laura and the children, and the tension in the car seemed to have subsided. 

There was still no sound from Barnes until the car stopped and he jerked awake, his instinctive scream silently dying on his lips. 

 

“So what’s all this?” Jess asked, picking up a yellowed piece of paper when they finally got to sit down around the table of their temporary ‘safe house’ at the foot of Wundagore Mountain. Pietro had promised Clint that the owner of the small guesthouse was trustworthy and Clint had promised Natasha that Pietro wouldn’t lie about it, so Natasha had lied to Barnes that Clint could be trusted about these things. 

“Stuff from the SSR?” Clint explained, glancing at the embossed emblem at the top of some of the pages that Natasha had taken from the inside of the cut out atlas and spread on the table in front of her. “SHIELD’s dysfunctional older stepbrother.” 

“Excuse me, are you implying that SHIELD was in any way a step up from dysfunctional?” Jess raised an eyebrow and Clint’s face did a funny thing that implied ‘keep your sass to yourself’. 

Natasha cleared her throat. 

“Do you recognise anyone? Does anything look familiar?” she asked and Barnes looked up from the small photograph of a pretty, young woman in the top right corner of a partly redacted person file. _Dorothy Underwood, (alias not confirmed)_ , the file read. A Russian agent, she’d been in custody multiple times, Peggy Carter’s name showing up regularly. Eventually she’d disappeared behind the Iron Curtain and hadn’t been heard of again. _Presumed dead_ was the conclusion, dated 1957, where she’d supposedly been seen at the sight of an explosion and some remains had been identified as hers. 

“No,” he said and put down the file. “I can’t remember ever seeing this woman.” 

“Removed vocal chords,” Jess wrinkled her nose at the piece of paper she had picked up from the bottom of the stack and was now reading. There were pictures of men with scars across their throats attached. “Voluntarily? Way to tune up the creep factor.” 

“It’s the lack of anaesthesia that bothers me, to be honest,” Clint frowned, shuffling through the few other papers. “For one, how did the SSR find out about this, and for two, how is that even possible? I mean... that requires some major fanaticism.” 

“Or hypnosis,” Natasha pulled out a file, scanning the dates and the picture at the top. A fading photograph showed an officer with his mouth in a tight line, jaw squared and eyes focused beyond the camera. He was wearing familiar insignia. “Dr. Johann Fennhoff, originally from Austria, he was a physician and member of the Red Army, and a survivor of the Battle of Finow.” 

“Never heard of it,” Clint frowned. “I think?” He looked around the table and everyone shook their heads. Jess had opened a bottle of wine in the meantime and was leaning back in her chair, looking tired and unimpressed after days of nonstop driving. Barnes was brooding, so Clint shrugged and turned back to Natasha, who had read on. 

“Apparently Finow was a slaughterfest that killed Fennhoff’s brother and left him with a grudge against Howard Stark. He supposedly joined Leviathan at some point, then came to the US under SSR protection when the war was over, and manipulated a number of SSR agents into suicide.”

“As you do,” Jess sighed grimly.

“It looks like he could exact mind control to a point of brainwashing.” Natasha paused. Clint and Jess were awkwardly still, and Natasha tried to feel for tension coming from Barnes, but he was impassive and unmoving in the corner of her eye. She had no doubt that he was listening, though. She cleared her throat. “Eventually he tried to kill Stark himself, with the help of Underwood, and was subsequently imprisoned. He died less than a year later in his sleep, supposedly of seizures that he’d been having on and off for a couple of months, but that doctors weren’t able to treat successfully.”

“So how does this lead us to HYDRA, though?” Clint asked. “I mean, he’s mostly a footnote in these files, and he died in prison. The bulk of data is on this Underwood woman, and especially the mission report from Russia, where they found Fennhoff in the first place, it sounds more like, you know, it sounds less than HYDRA and... a lot more like the Red Room.” He looked at Natasha and she bit her lip. 

“It does. Though if HYDRA was in the KGB, this might be the link.” She looked at Barnes. It was a nice theory, but without results. It wasn’t unreasonable, but there was still nothing in particular that got them anywhere further on the history of the Winter Soldier. 

“I’ve seen this man,” Barnes said, suddenly, the way he always spoke, like he couldn’t quite figure out the flow of the argument. He pointed at the picture of the older Fennhoff that was paperclipped to the bottom of the page Natasha was holding. 

“That... seems unlikely,” Clint frowned, looking from Natasha to Barnes, who didn’t elaborate. “That would leave us with a pretty narrow window between your... going missing in action and him being taken into custody in Russia. Couple of years, max.” 

“Is there even a slight possibility that you remember him from before?” Jess had straightened up in her chair, her interest apparently roused, and Natasha glanced at Barnes, who looked glum and frustrated. 

“I don’t know,” he said defiantly. 

Jess looked sceptical, going back to her wine, and Natasha didn’t say anything more on the subject, instead looked back down at the file. There was no birth date given for Fennhoff, nor any detailed military records, but Jess’s suggestion wasn’t unreasonable. Fennhoff and Bucky Barnes had both been stationed in Europe, and it had occurred to her before that maybe some of Barnes’ memories dated back further than he realised. 

“Is there any more information on Fennhoff anywhere?” she asked, and Clint, who was shuffling through the pages, shook his head. 

“Doesn’t look like it,” he said. “Nothing else in your folder?” 

“No, his imprisonment was without major incidents apart from his seizures.” Natasha stopped, turning over the page to check the backside, which was empty. She scanned the front again, lifting off the photographs to look behind them. “There’s just a short note that he was reported dead by his cellmate one morning-” She broke off, then looked up at Clint. “Motherfucker.” 

Clint took the file from her hand and glanced at it. 

“Well, fuck me sideways.” 

“They put him in a cell with Arnim Zola,” Natasha said, as Clint put down the file for Jess and Barnes to see. “I guess that’s our connection.” 

“He was wearing a muzzle,” Clint pointed out, but when Natasha looked unimpressed, he shrugged and handed the file over to Jess, who offered it to Barnes before taking a look at it herself. 

“We’re talking about Zola,” Natasha argued. “He had himself turned into a freaking database. You bet he’d find a way to milk every bit of information from Fennhoff, muzzle or not. I mean, he wormed his way into SHIELD eventually; if Fennhoff as much as mentioned Underwood or Leviathan to Zola, Zola would’ve used it to his advantage.” 

“You think he killed Fennhoff when he had what he wanted?” Clint threw in, and to Natasha’s surprise it was Jess who said,

“No.” She put the photograph of Fennhoff back onto the table and stabbed her index finger onto his forehead. “Not to make your SSR club look even worse than it already does for making two known terrorist psychopaths cell buddies, but this man died in 1982 in Latveria, and he was known as Doctor Faustus.” 

 

_“I’m not in trouble now, am I?”_

Natasha smiled into her phone, huddling into the corner of the room. There was only little time until the others would come in and settle down for the night, and she herself would probably make use of whatever hot water was left in the bathroom. 

“I don’t know,” she replied, smiling. “Are you?” 

“ _Wanda sent you the picture_.” Steve very obviously tried to feign exasperation, but failed miserably. 

“Don’t play coy on me, Rogers,” she smiled. “You’re not in trouble. I was just...” What was she, exactly? “Checking in, I guess. I went off the grid really suddenly.” 

“ _Well, I trust you enough to tell me if it’s because we’re all too boring for you, or because you don’t like the new breakfast cereal_ ,” he joked, then turned a little more serious. “ _But you’re okay, right? You’d tell me if you... you know, if there was anything I could do?_ ” 

Natasha licked her lips. 

“The newspaper says someone shot Lukin,” she said, and Steve fell quiet the other end, as if he was expecting the worst despite himself. Natasha took a deep breath. “Steve, I need you to know that it wasn’t me. I wasn’t involved in this, I swear to you.”

“ _I... thanks_ ,” he said, huffing a guilty laugh. “ _I’m actually... an asshole, I’m sorry. It’s not like I suspected you, or-_ ”

“No, I know, I know what it looks like,” she said. “But this isn’t why I went off the grid. God knows, I’d been keeping tabs on all of them for years, and I wouldn’t have... Your trust means a great deal to me.” 

From the corner of her eye, she could see Barnes step into the room and the sincerity of her words left a bitter, ashen taste in her mouth. Steve’s trust, so important, and yet here she was, shacking up with Bucky Barnes’ ghost. She suddenly regretted calling him. 

“ _Do you know when you’ll be home?_ ” Steve asked and Natasha groaned wearily. 

“I don’t know. Maybe soon. There’s someone who needs my help. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet her when it’s all done,” she diverted into a half-truth. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable that Clint would eventually convince Jess to come back with them, but that was hardly Natasha’s own accomplishment. Barnes, though, if she could get him to come back... Steve might actually forgive her for what they were about to do. 

“ _Well, in the meantime we’ll all be getting a new training course that we’ll totally beat you in when you come back_ ,” Steve teased and Natasha let out a snort. 

“And what is it you dream of when you’re actually asleep, Rogers?” 

It was quiet for a moment, then Steve’s dry voice came through.

“ _Damnit, I was trying to come up with something better than ‘your mum’, and now the moment is totally gone_.” He laughed, and Natasha did too, groaning just a little. 

“You’re horrible. I’ll inform Clint that you’re now officially the worst.” 

Across the room, Barnes was moving closer, edging along the wall and taking in the layout of the room. He glanced at Natasha occasionally, not looking quite intrigued, but... perhaps a little.

“ _Well, I do my best without you._ ” 

They both chuckled for another moment, then Steve cleared his throat. 

“ _You feeling better?_ ” 

He sounded wholesome and genuine and caring, and how did he even do that? 

“I do,” she said, quietly. Her eyes were on Barnes and something in her chest hurt. “I have to go. Thank you, Steve.” 

“ _Take care, Nat._ ” 

She hung up and was about to put her phone away, but her gaze lingered on the picture Wanda had sent her, of herself with her thumbs up next to Steve, who was holding up a sign that read something along the lines of “please truss me up and ride me like a pony” in Sokovian.

“He doesn’t...” Barnes blurted out, suddenly behind her and looking at the picture over her shoulder. He looked caught when she glanced at him, but he cleared his throat. “He doesn’t know what it says, does he?”   
Natasha chuckled, then held up the phone to zoom in on Steve’s shit-eating grin that lay half hidden behind his innocent demeanour. 

“Don’t let the retriever shtick fool you,” she said. “The question is does he actually _mean_ it or not.” 

She’d said the wrong thing, she realised the moment the last word had left her lips. She could see his breath stutter, his words suddenly vanish in his mouth. He didn’t know what to say in return, wasn’t prepared for what she’d said and had nothing to contribute. He didn’t know Steve, and had no way of knowing how to talk about him like this.

“We should try and get some sleep tonight,” she changed the topic, and he nodded, cautiously walking over to the strategically least vulnerable bed in the room. He didn’t lie down; he usually slept sitting half upright leaning against something, incapable of relaxing in a supine position. 

Natasha watched him arrange himself quietly and didn’t comment.

Ten minutes later, the bathroom was free and she was rinsing her mouth after brushing her teeth. Tying her hair back into a loose ponytail, she looked grimly into the mirror. 

They were going to Latveria. 

It shamed her, she realised, her own determination and disregard for the people around her. An Avenger shouldn’t have done it, wouldn’t have betrayed the trust bestowed on her so readily. 

“Forgive me, Steve,” she muttered when she turned to leave for bed and switched off the light.


	8. House of Sleep

The air smelled of the past when they had removed the last of the rocks blocking the way and finally stepped into the compound. It was pitch black, and the corridor ahead of them appeared to have no end to it. They didn’t talk, each of them quietly making their way ahead, occasionally coughing when their lungs got too dry. 

Dust rose with every one of their steps.

It had taken them half a day to climb as high as they needed to, and another couple of hours to find the place where the entrance to Fennhoff’s old base had been collapsed by his enemies. 

Exhaustion was written into their faces, and their backpacks seemed to get heavier with every hour that they spent trying to move rocks and stones and shift the earth that had settled around them over the past decades. Had Barnes’ arm not been able to move superhuman weights of rock, it might have taken them all night to get through, despite Clint’s affinity for strategic stealth explosions and his Stark-made pocket laser cutter. 

So far their presence on the mountain had gone unnoticed as far as they could tell, but they’d all gotten antsier the more time had passed. If going to Russia had been politically unwise, coming to Latveria had been outright stupid, especially if they were blowing shit up right on Doom’s doorstep. Natasha tried not to think of what Steve would say if he ever found out. 

When they finally reached a bend in the tunnel, they stood before a locked door. Not sealed, not blasted through, just locked. Clint bent down by the keyhole and began to poke around in it. Natasha, who was pointing the flashlight for him to see, involuntarily shivered. It was cold inside the mountain, and it would get colder the further away from the outside world they got.

“There’s a key stuck in from the other side,” Clint muttered, grunting a little when finesse gave way to unsubtle force. He pulled an arrow from his quiver and a quiet crack and some smoke from the lock later, the door swung open.

“Oh, ugh-” Jess blurted out and impulsively stepped back, bumping into Barnes. “ _Fuck_.” 

Clint seemed to hold his breath for a long moment before getting up from his crouch and looking down at the dead body that lay across the floor just behind the door. He beat his hands off on the sides of his jeans, and for a moment none of them moved. 

“That’s some Indiana Jones vibe right there,” Clint eventually said before stepping over the body and turning around to meet Natasha’s eyes. “Grab the arms?” 

Natasha nodded and handed Barnes her flashlight before she bent down and gingerly picked at the man’s cuffs to lift him off the ground just enough to shift. He was in his full HYDRA uniform and his watch had stopped at 4:36. Natasha tried not to look into the hollow face, but it was clear that he’d been dead for a long while. 

“This is a grave,” Jessica said when she stepped through the door, slowly, with her eyes on the ground ahead. “I never... ”

“You said the Americans shut this facility down in the early eighties?” Natasha asked and Jess nodded. 

“They did, though not officially. Doom was just coming into power at the time and took great pains to establish himself as the sole political force in the country. For a while the story used to be that it was Doom who shut down this facility, though Strucker insisted that Doom merely turned it into good publicity for his career as a dictator.” She looked at the dead man at their feet. “I just... it never occurred to me that they just collapsed every possible way out and that there were still people inside, you know, alive.” 

“Must have been more than just collapsing the exit,” Barnes said gruffly, gesturing back at the man they’d left by the door as they moved on. “This guy died where he stood. He didn’t slowly starve to death.”

“There’s no signs of violence, and the door was locked from the inside” Natasha said. “Poison gas, perhaps.” Pulling her phone from her pocket, she calibrated its sensor settings, and nodded at Clint. “Switch on your air monitor. We don’t need surprises.” 

There was no sign of poisonous gas in the air, or any residue thereof, she noticed with relief.

“So you think Pierce was behind it?” Clint asked suddenly, looking around. “Early eighties, he’d have been in charge already if he took over after Zola’s death. If Zola told him about the Winter Soldier-” he broke off and threw an apologetic look at Barnes. “Sorry, man. I mean... Jess, you said Faustus died in what, 1982? If he left a power vacuum within HYDRA of any kind, you bet Pierce would have been the first to come running for the goodies.” 

“Yes,” Barnes said gruffly. “Not that I remember, but... yes. Why not.” 

They went onwards, further into the mountain, and the air grew dustier and thicker. When they reached another door, it opened without difficulty. There were no more dead bodies inside, but they had obviously reached a part of the compound that had once been inhabited on a permanent basis. 

“Take a look around,” Natasha said, turning towards a small alcove with a door to her right. “Shout if you find anything.”

“Should’ve brought a canary,” Clint nodded. 

“I thought we did,” Jess joked, pointedly looking at Clint, who pulled a face. 

“Right, off we go.” 

Natasha opened the door in front of her, and it creaked slightly in its hinges. When she stepped through, a haunting familiarity overtook her. 

Computers. Again. 

There were two corpses in uniforms sprawled across the control panels, men slumped forward from where they’d sat on office chairs that had rolled back with the shift of pressure. 

They, too, had died where they’d sat.

Natasha stepped further into the room and looked around. All the screens were dark and covered in a thick layer of dust. The men both bore the insignia of HYDRA officers, though the skull design was slightly different than the ones Natasha had seen. Different affiliations often used different versions of the same emblem, but this one she hadn’t seen before. This one had been erased thirty years ago, she reminded herself.

The next room she entered had been a kitchen once, chairs still neatly arranged around the table, old mugs in a row on a shelf above the sink. Whatever uncanned food there had been in the pantry now had a fossilised look to it, and Natasha gave it a wide berth. 

The rooms that followed were equally ghostly; one of them nothing more than a cupboard, the other one some kind of giant cutout box, in which numerous cables were plugged into a wall of sockets, and switches could be flipped for differently labelled sectors of the compound. All the lamps were dark, and some of the cables looked singed. At some point the electricity had given out violently.

The distant sound of Jess’ voice brought her attention back to the moment. 

She made her way ahead and noticed that one of the others, probably Clint, had already covered the rooms ahead; their doors were open and footsteps were visible in the dirt on the floor. 

Natasha’s own shoes were covered in dust almost up to the ankle.

She reached a flight of stairs that led down into the dark of the mountain. 

“Jess?” 

“Down here,” came Clint’s voice, and Natasha was about halfway down when the staircase split; one way going left, the other right. She was about to call out for them, when she spotted a flash of light from the corner of her eye, and turned towards it. 

“Clint?” she asked, watching where she stepped. There were footprints on the floor. 

She could hear a soft whimper and slowly, carefully walked on. 

Barnes’ metal arm caught the light of her flashlight and his head turned in her direction before he looked away again, hiding his face behind his hair. Even in the darkness, she could see he was upset; his own flashlight pointed straight down towards the floor, the round circle of light shaking minutely. 

“Barnes, are you okay?” Natasha asked quietly, stepping up to him, and the moment she did, she wished she hadn’t asked. 

She’d entered a room, and in the middle of the room was a surgeon’s table, with straps attached to its sides, now hanging down loosely into the dust on the floor. The buckles reflected weakly when the beam of her flashlight hit them, rusty and brittle with time. 

The walls were lined with counters and surgical utensils, little beakers of faded glass and grotesque electrical appliances, the use of which Natasha could only guess at. 

Attached by tubes and thick bundles of cables to a generator at the back of the room and towering above it all was a machine that could have been out of a Giger nightmare. A mechanic arm extended down from the ceiling, ending in a spidery hand of gleaming metal that came down above the head end of the surgical table. More tubes and cables were hanging down from its palm and from between its fingers, each cable ending in a small electrode embedded in circular patch of dull rubber. 

There was a subdued sense of horror that radiated from the contraption, and Natasha couldn’t have said whether it was because of the thing itself, because of the cold inside the chamber, or because of the sounds that Barnes tried to swallow with each breath. 

She stepped closer to him and tried to touch his fingers. She stood to his left, and his fingers were cold and didn’t react to hers brushing against them. 

“I remember this place,” Barnes said, and his voice sent chills down Natasha’s spine. She didn’t dare move for a long moment, instead stood transfixed looking up at his face. Suddenly, he tore his gaze away from the table to look at her. 

“We shouldn’t have come here.” 

Natasha let go of the breath she’d been holding and gently put her hand on his arm, his real arm. 

“We won’t stay long.” She squeezed just a little, and tried to look like she hadn’t just discovered the nightmare that had been his past. “If we ever find anything, then it’s gonna be here.” 

“I don’t want to find it anymore.” There was pain on his face, and he seemed to hold back more words that were already half on his lips. 

“Guys?” Clint’s voice suddenly tore through the silence, and the light of his flashlight briefly blinded both Natasha and Barnes when he pointed it their way from the outside corridor. “Jess found something. You really wanna take a look.” 

Clint didn’t come into the room, didn’t stop to look at the machines, but instead left again when he caught Natasha’s eyes, and a second later his steps were retreating. 

“You had a nightmare again last night,” Natasha said quietly to Barnes and he didn’t look at her. She wet her lips. “Look, I won’t pretend I know what this must feel like for you. I get that half of you doesn’t want to find what we’re looking for; tell you the truth, I don’t think I’d want to know if I were you.”

He was looking at her now, face unreadable and eyes almost looking through her. 

“We’re here now,” she said, firmly and with a tone of finality. “There’s no walking away from this, and even if you do, this all here,” - she swept the beam of her flashlight across the room - “It’s still going to be there.”

His head was hung, and he seemed lost in himself for a long moment. Natasha took a step back and away from him, turning towards the door. 

 

When Natasha caught up with Clint and Jess, who stood about halfway down a corridor at the end of another staircase leading further down, their flashlights beacons in the darkness, Barnes was behind her, and his face was impassive. 

“That what you’re looking for?” Jess greeted her, pointing her light into the room. 

“Holy shit.” Natasha stood stunned, her heart hammering in her ears with a rush of unexpected adrenaline. 

Ahead of them, from one end of the low room to the other, were rows and rows of file cabinets and shelves, interspersed with desks. The top drawer of the cabinet closest to the door had been pulled open, probably by Clint or Jess, and was filled with ledgers. The smell of old paper filled the air. 

It was almost too good to be true.

“Okay,” Natasha said, shaking herself back into action. Deep breath. “Okay, you... Guys, this is where we look for anything we know might be connected to what we’re looking for. Fennhoff, Underwood, Leviathan, the Red Room, Jess’ father, any record of James Buchanan Barnes, or any super soldier programme...” 

They’d never get through all of it, she realised. There was too much. 

“Go!” Clint clapped his hands, and without further talking they spread out through the room down different aisles. 

Natasha took one of the aisles towards the back of the room, noticing how Barnes skirted along the walls, not approaching the cabinets and instead looking at the cases in one corner that held something that might have been scrolls of old film behind their dusty glass-panelled doors. 

She had half a mind to tell him to make himself useful, but then reconsidered. 

Focusing back on the cabinets of her aisle, she opened a drawer at random. The first file she took out contained technical data; designs for some hydraulic machine that had been scrapped at some point. She put it back down and opened more drawers, peeking at the little label tags by which they were sorted in the hopes of finding something good. None of them were promising, all of the files appeared to refer to things rather than to people or events. 

She moved further down the aisle and stopped at one of the desks. The body of a woman was sitting bent over a typewriter, the same way the men she’d seen earlier had, simply slumped over her work when she’d died.

Carefully pulling out the piece of paper that was stuck in the typewriter, Natasha blew the dust off the page and pointed her flashlight at the faded writing. 

The writing was in German and stopped mid-sentence. It was also obviously part of a longer document, and Natasha looked around briefly if there were more pages lying in the dust on the tabletop. The page in her hands spoke of failed negotiations and hostile responses to HYDRA agents dispatched. _There can be no question about the ownershippp_

Natasha picked up another page from the desktop and looked at what had to be the first page of a letter. It was addressed to Baron von Strucker and dated 1982. 

_Concerning the theft of the asset “Winter Soldier” by a rogue HYDRA delegation under the command of Alexander Pierce we urge you to exert political pressure-_

Clint had been right, it seemed. 

“Natasha,” Clint’s voice suddenly said, and Natasha tore her gaze away from the letter. Clint looked shaken when she turned his way, and she frowned, holding up her letter. He shook his head. “You should come look at this,” he said, his throat dry. 

Jess seemed to be brooding over a file of her own, and Barnes, when Natasha looked around, was nowhere to be found. There was a small door beside the cabinets that housed the film scrolls, however, and it stood open. 

“Natasha,” Clint said again, and she put down the two pages to walk over to him. 

“What is it?”

Clint pressed his lips together, then simply shoved a file at her. 

_The Black Widow Programme_ , it read.

The beginning of the Black Widow programme. Natasha swallowed, and Clint flipped open the ledger. 

“I found Dottie Underwood,” he said, and Natasha looked down at the picture of a sharp looking woman with her hair tied straight back and he mouth in a tight line. She was beautiful and terrifying, and she embodied everything Natasha remembered about her time in the Red Room.

_Lyudmila Antonovna Kudrin_ was the name next to the picture. 

She put down the sheet of paper when Clint pulled out another photograph and cleared his throat. The photograph was part of a physical examination protocol, and it showed her left arm and hand, and the dark scar tissue that ran around her wrist. She also had a small mole on the back of her hand, just below her index finger. 

“I’ve seen this before,” Clint said quietly, while Natasha dug deeper into the file, shoving aside mission reports and updates on the Red Room training. “We’ve met her, Nat.” 

Natasha frowned. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean,” Clint replied, “that about a week ago we saved this woman from being ripped to pieces by the Winter Soldier. I held this hand while we made it out of the building.” 

Natasha stared at him. The old woman in Moscow, who had barely opened her mouth before Barnes had gone for her, out of his mind and blind with inexplicable rage. 

“Are you sure? How is that even possible?” she breathed and Clint grimaced. 

“Possible isn’t the problem,” he said. “But a coincidence?” 

“It can’t be.” It _couldn’t_ be, Natasha thought, shaking her head as she blindly dug further into the file. So many bridges burned, so many people dead, so many trails gone cold, all traces erased, and they had ended up in the apartment of this one woman. 

“Is there more?” She eventually asked when she’d reached the bottom of the file without finding anything other than layouts of buildings and chemical formulas. Clint had already bent down to retrieve more folders from the cabinet. _The Black Widow Programme I, 1954-1959._

There were data sheets with pictures of children, young girls aged maybe four or five, their hair pulled back and their faces so hard and earnest, something was closing around Natasha’s heart. The files gave no information on their birthday or parents, only the area of their origin, all over the Soviet Union. 

“Most of them died before they were ten,” Clint said, throat tight, and Natasha saw his fingers trace the date 1956 on the file of a sweet, dark-haired girl with large, round eyes. 

“The Red Room was built on the bodies of little girls,” Natasha whispered, voice shaking. “And if what we know of Dottie Underwood’s origins is right, then even more so.” 

She picked up a group picture of Dottie Underwood, or no, Lyudmila Kudrin, surrounded by unsmiling children gathered around an old car from the war. The girls held themselves straight and rigid, and there were fewer girls in the picture than there were files in the ledger. A good third of them had died by the time the photograph had been taken. 

Natasha moved her finger across the fading shades of grey on the paper, taking in the little round faces, until her hand slowed and finally stopped, hovering over a face in the far left of the group. Beside her, Clint, too, had gone still. 

“This is impossible,” he breathed, more to himself than to her, and Natasha couldn’t bring herself to look over at whatever page he was looking at. She was still staring at the group photograph, listening to the sound of her own blood rushing in her ears. 

It was impossible. It was a mistake, a false likeness, a grainy picture blurred after half a century. 

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they darted to the file in Clint’s hand. 

“It can’t be,” she mouthed, and he turned his head to look at her. 

Her own gaze was transfixed on the picture in the top right corner of the file.   
_Natalia Alianovna Romanova, recruited December 1948. Origin: Greater Moscow_.

The eyes that looked up to her from the picture were her own. 

“Natasha-”

“No,” she cut him off, her hands suddenly shaking. “No. This isn’t right.” Impulsively, she grabbed the piece of paper from his hand, eyes darting down the page. _Hair colour, eye colour, mother tongues, skill set, fingerprints_. There was a list of basic and advanced training exercises marked complete with a date, a number of hand-to-hand combat lessons, infiltration, sabotage, short and long range weapons, interrogation, emotional manipulation, language courses in English, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Swedish, Hindi. Towards the end of the page, the achievement _target elimination with extreme prejudice_ was marked completed with August 11th 1960. 

“The date, it has to be wrong,” she said, looking up at Clint, whose eyes were... sad. His lip was trembling, as if he was trying to find words to say, but all he could do was shake his head. 

Natasha laughed, a short, hysteric cough. 

“It’s a fake, Clint! We were set up to find this here, and someone planted this for us to believe it.” She grabbed Clint by the front of his jacket. “Clint, look at me, how could I possibly be here?” 

Clint averted his eyes, looking through the room, and Natasha wanted to shake him, strangle him. All of a sudden she sympathised with Barnes’ rage that seemed to be under his skin always. 

Barnes, who looked barely barely thirty and, somehow, ninety-five at the same time. 

Natasha pushed away from Clint and, scanning the dim room, realised Barnes was gone. 

Jess was still there, looking over to them apprehensively now, surrounded by stacks of files, some of which she had put aside. Her eyes darted from Natasha to Clint and back, and she opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again. 

Natasha’s mind was reeling, thoughts running a thousand miles a second, until the sound of shattering glass and an eerie, tortured scream echoed through the room from the door at the back of the room. 

“Barnes,” Clint said, and was already moving, when Natasha held him back, her eyes still unable to keep returning to her six year old self and her own accusatory gaze. 

“I’ll go,” she said, her feet moving before she realised it. 

“Nat-” Clint began, and she silenced him with a jerk of her arm. 

“I’ll go. Stay here!” she snapped, her other hand tearing at her collar to ease the feeling of suffocation that had crept over her. 

She had the presence of mind to grab her flashlight on the way to the back of the room where she’d seen Barnes last, and it lit up yet another tunnelly corridor leading somewhere even colder and darker. 

She was stumbling, ankles twisting with every other step, and Natasha fell into a wall and heaved a hoarse breath, vision blurry and head spinning. Trying to regain her balance, she turned off her light and let herself sink into a crouch, eyes pressed shut against the blackness around her. 

For a long minute, all she heard was her own ragged breath. 

Then it was quiet. 

And then there were voices, scratchy and faint, and it took Natasha a moment to fully realise that she wasn’t imagining them. 

Opening her eyes and looking ahead, she saw the flickering of light, and when she stood up and stepped closer, a steady buzzing, and... more voices. 

One of them was Barnes’, but it sounded unreal, as if he was talking through the storm. 

Once again her feet carried her onwards before she was fully aware of it. Rounding a corner, she spotted Barnes, sunk to his knees with his metal arm stretched onto a table, light and shadow dancing across his face as he gazed ahead. There was an open ledger on the table under his arm, and two sheets of paper had fallen to the floor.

He didn’t react when she called his name, and the reflection of light on his arm caught her eye. There was a black square inside his elbow, and where the metal plating had been removed to reveal a web of wires. 

Beside him, a reel projector was quietly rattling, its black power cord dissected and attached to the inside of Barnes’ bionic arm. 

There was a noise, barely human, coming from the old speaker attached to the projector before the sound suddenly cut out again, and Natasha, who had walked up to Barnes and looked down at him, saw the silent tears that dropped from his eyes. 

Slowly, reluctantly, she looked up at the dancing images on the wall. 

It was Barnes, looking beaten and haggard, and wild with anger, being dragged into a room by faceless men. His hair was the only thing that suggested that the man on the reel was any younger than the man on his knees beside her. 

The James Barnes mutely flickering on the wall was gagged and forced onto a surgeon’s table, while other people were visible to be shuffling around the edge of the frame without ever stepping fully into view. Finally, a man leaned towards the lens from the side, talking to someone behind the camera and nodding as he took notes. 

Of all the people in the room, nobody seemed to pay any attention to the man struggling against his restraints on the table. 

There was commotion to one side of the frame and all heads turned. The sound came back, crackling low, then died again. An old man walked into the picture, leaning heavily on a cane and handing out instructions to some of the men in the room. A chair was brought for him and he sat down beside Barnes, cane across his lap. 

At the back of the picture, people were taking notes and nodding at each other. The old man was rubbing and kneading his hands as if he was very tired. 

When he faced the camera head on, Natasha recognised Johann Fennhoff. Doctor Faustus. 

Eventually, Fennhoff’s eyes settled on Barnes and he said something. Barnes, still tearing at the straps that bound him, rattled the table to a point where some of the bystanders began to look worried. 

“ _You have to look at me when we’re talking_ ,” Fennhoff’s voice buzzed through the noise of static. 

The picture abruptly cut out and when it came back, Barnes was looking at Fennhoff, chest heaving as if he was sobbing, or gasping for breath. His limbs had gone still, though, and his eyes remained fixed on the old man when he got back to his feet. 

For a moment, Natasha thought she could hear music play, but realised she must imagine it among the crackling of static. 

“ _-in pain. I’m here to help make it stop._ ” 

Fennhoff was slowly, slowly stepping around the surgeon’s table, without the aid of his cane this time, instead clasping his hands in front of his body and fiddling with something too small for Natasha to make out. 

The camera was pushed and the image shook, and the scientists held their clipboards a little higher as if to shield themselves from something Natasha couldn’t see. And Barnes- Barnes was looking at the camera, or right past it, pain etched into his face. The old man’s lips continued to move. 

“ _Look at me. You will focus on me-_ ” 

The camera was rattled again and this time the people in the frame appeared to shout at someone. When the image stabilised again, Barnes’ face, as if forced by an invisible hand, slowly turned to look at Fennhoff again. 

For long minutes, time seemed to be at standstill, and only the old man’s lips moved. Barnes lay motionless, his chest alone still heaving, less and less heavily with every passing second. 

Natasha almost jumped out of her skin, when the real James Barnes beside her slammed his human fist onto the table in front of him. His body was tense even as it was sunk to the floor, and it appeared as if different forces were tearing at him all at once, sealing him into place. 

All of a sudden, there was music again, this time louder and clearer, and the old man finished: 

“ _-last time you remember seeing it_.” 

And as the Barnes on the wall screamed, Natasha heard herself scream then, too, eerie and raw, from the other side of fifty years of false memories. Her own voice, and her blurred shape made it halfway to Barnes’ table before the room was suddenly plunged into pitch black. 

The projector crashed to the floor and shattered into pieces, and Barnes moved past her on his way out of the chamber, his steps retreating down the corridor until they were gone. The sheets of paper that had been upset by his departure sailed to the ground with a gentle whoosh of air that was followed by deafening silence. 

 

“I’m in here,” Natasha answered automatically, when Clint and Jess’ worried voices reached her. 

She was standing beside the broken projector in a mess of loose film, shards of plastic and metal, and the cracked case of the film reel that was labelled with a serial number. The same serial number was written on the front of the file ledger that Barnes had taken from the filing room. 

Natasha stared down at the pictures and the writing without reading or processing any of it. Her vision felt blurry, as if everything she saw was different shades of colour without assembling into a coherent, meaningful whole. There were photographs, and she knew her own face without recognising herself in it.   
It was only when Clint’s flashlight blinded her that she looked up and towards the door. 

“What happened? Barnes stormed out like he was running from a crime scene,” Jess said, looking disturbed and unsettled, and Natasha stared at her for a long moment, before looking back down at the ledger. 

“Nothing,” she replied dully, and Clint looked legitimately worried now. 

“Nat,” he began, taking a step towards her and stopping when he saw the mess around her feet. 

“I need to get out of here,” she suddenly said, and, clutching the file to her chest, she rushed past Clint and Jess, who took a surprised jump out of the way. She ignored them calling after her, instead sped up as she ran back through the archive room and down corridors and up, up, up staircase after staircase. 

The outside world was the dark at the end of the tunnel, and the fresh and cold air hit her like a brick wall.


	9. Anthem

Natasha stopped when there was no more ground ahead. The ruined remains of what had once been a fortifying wall along the side of the mountain were the last thing separating her from a long way down into a sea of lights that were the city of Doomstadt.

It was quiet around her, as if the world didn’t reach this far up the mountain at night, and she put the file down on the stones of the wall before dropping her backpack and leaning forward onto the mossy stones to rest her head in her hands. 

Beside her, the file lay still, and she didn’t know how long she stood there before she grabbed it and let it fall open. 

_15-06-1972 Both agents located and subsequently taken into custody for preliminary questioning yesterday at 2345, 25km west of Lake Markakol. Their separate mission reports appear in accordance with orders; both confirm the state of the facility by the time of their arrival as burnt down almost entirely. Neither report satisfies inquiries as to their abandonment of the extraction point specified in their mission briefing. Upon urgent request both subjects and the only surviving inhabitant of the facility have been prepared for transfer back to be interrogated by Doctor Faustus in person._

She read the paragraph three times, but the words seemed empty and meaningless to her, as if they were in a foreign language she’d never learned to understand. 

Natasha put down the written report and instead went through the file for more photographs. The series of shots she’d looked at before Clint and Jess had come in was on top of the pile. The three pictures had been taken in some unknown desert camp, and both her and Barnes were decked out in camouflage and gear, receiving orders from a faceless man. Their faces were sharp and impassive. The next shot showed the commanding officer turning away, his face blurry, and behind him, she turned to Barnes to say something, and Barnes... smiled. Privately and only half visible from behind his hair, but genuinely and handsomely, only for her to see. 

In the final shot of the series he had spotted the camera, and his face was blank again.

The pictures were dated September 1969. 

There were mugshots of her and Barnes dated 1972, both their faces bloodied and scratched, their expressions carefully neutral. There was also a mugshot of a small girl, maybe seven or eight years old. Her eyes were wide and her mouth tight, but there was something about her expression that wouldn’t let Natasha look away. She was holding a sign with a number and the name _Yelena Belova_ written on it, and there was a familiarity there, in the curve of her lip, the arch of her eyebrow. There was something about her innocence that unsettled Natasha deep in her gut. 

She found more pictures from missions throughout the late 1960s up until 1972. Grainy security footage of Barnes carrying her out of a building, images of them facing hostile fire, some of them training together. In one glossy photo they were dancing amidst politicians and aristocrats, and Natasha could tell from the posture of her own back where she was hiding her weapons. 

The pictures appeared random and disconnected, two assassins who formed a strike team. A documentary of blood spilled in the name of HYDRA and the motherland. 

It was her own face that gave her away in the end, the briefest of moments captured on film. Natasha knew her own features, knew her own smile, knew all the different ways to fake it, and all the things she could make her face display. And what she recognised was none of these things, it was more, even, than genuine happiness, more than the joy or amusement of a moment. She’d never seen herself look this way. 

Until now, in a picture of a moment she couldn’t remember, looking at James Barnes, the Winter Soldier. 

It was like the pieces were falling together all of a sudden, all the different photographs of them suddenly morphed into something else. The casual touch of his hand on her shoulder here, how close they stood there, and how she rested her head on his shoulder when he carried her. 

No, no, no...

She slammed the file shut on the pictures and took a step back, gulping breaths of air. 

No. 

The cracking of a twig made her spin around, and she spotted Barnes, who was already taking a step back.

“I didn’t know you were here,” he muttered, half turning to leave. “I was...” 

“Operation Winterschlaf,” she pressed out, and his eyes darted to the file on the ledger. She flipped it open again and spread the photos out without looking at them. 

He stepped closer, but didn’t reach out, only looked. Something in his jaw was twitching, and he swallowed. 

“I wish... it wasn’t,” he said quietly, and his eyes darted up at hers. “I’m sorry.” 

It was barely a whisper, but her breath caught in her throat and suddenly broke free in a horrible, gut-wrenching sob that shook her body and stung in her chest. Her mouth was twisted and hot tears were streaming down her face when she buried it in her hands. 

She couldn’t see anything in the dark anymore, couldn’t hear anything but the ugly, hoarse sobs that hacked up her throat until she had to gasp for breath. 

Her hand clasped down on the sheets of paper under her fingers, crumpling up the letters and the image of her own strange face next to Barnes’. 

The ache was overwhelming her in that moment, and she stood feeling like her heart broke, and then over again, and over and over. 

She tried to look up at Barnes, whose fingers were pulling the paper out from under her hand, but she could barely make out the shape of his face for the tears in her thick and puffy eyes. Her hand clamped down on the metal of his wrist and the fresh wave of tears was accompanied by a sense of unbearable longing. Curling into herself she reflexively licked the salt and the snot off her lower lip, the cuffs of her shirt drenched in tears that wouldn’t stop coming, and she gave up trying to wipe them away.

The look in her eyes was haunting her even with her eyes closed. Belonged. She had belonged there, with him. Of all the horrible places in the world.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again, and his voice sounded defeated in a way that she’d never heard, heavy with uncensored honesty and true, heartbroken regret.

“God, I wish I could remember how it felt,” she sobbed out, voice rough and high pitched as her breath caught in her throat and her body shook again, knees buckling slightly to keep balance. “I want to remember how it felt... so badly... I hate it. I hate it!” 

She could feel the warmth of his other hand through the sleeve of her jacket as he was steadying her arm and pulling her upright, and just a little bit closer. Her wet face slid across the leather of his jacket, the mess that was her hair catching in the zipper of his breast pocket. One of his arms tentatively curled around her back and she let herself fall against him, sobbing like she hadn’t since she could remember, selfishly, for herself and only herself. 

His hand brushed away the shiver that was crawling up her back and she burrowed her nose deeper into his collar. His scent was comforting, but unfamiliar, and it would never repair what had been done to the both of them.

Blinking through her own tears, Natasha realised that he was crying too. 

 

_18-06-1972 Interrogation of the American yielding no results. Report is an exact reproduction of the information given to officers at the time of detainment, no further additions or deviations. Subject denies involvement in the burning down of the facility and the connected death of twenty-six inhabitants._

_Black Widow unresponsive when presented with incriminating evidence of her and the American’s intended defection. Recorded pain threshold impressive, strong resistance to methods of torture and persuasion. Mission failure reported to Department X._

_19-06-1972 No response from either subject regarding the testimony of the surviving child Y. Belova, accusing both agents of conspiracy and arson._

_20-06-1972 Both subjects unresponsive to torture._

_21-06-1972 Black Widow displaying healing factor beyond the expected degree. No statement obtained from either subject on the evidence regarding alleged arson and intended defection._

_22-06-1972 Continued isolation and interrogation of the subjects. Evidence of past fraternisation on operations in Sudan, South Africa, France, Japan and the Vietnam brought forth by investigators. Demands from Kremel to hand over Black Widow received and filed; request for direct communication with A. Lukin in the matter._

_23-06-1972 American’s ability to focus deteriorating with each session, suspected mental instability and failure of conditioning. Calculating risk of complete mental reconditioning and memory modification._

_24-06-1972 Violent schizophrenic breakdown suggests more drastic measures to keep the American operating. Hypnosis showing mild if not satisfactory improvement of stability, though not permanent.  
Black Widow tranquilised after attempted murder of her cell guard. A. Lukin protesting continued detainment and maltreatment of his agent._

_25-06-1972 Loss of American’s Russian, Hindi and Mandarin language proficiency after prolonged psychological stabilisation procedure. 2 scientific assistants killed in violent outbreak. Possibility of necessary agent deactivation if mental erosion continues._

_26-06-1972 Black Widow refusing food for the third day; still no cooperation with interrogators. Truth serum trial failed._

_02-08-1972 Black Widow retained while attempting to break free the American after successful escape from her cell. 8 casualties, American catatonic since the incident, Black Widow stripped of clothing and under surveillance to prevent suicide. A. Lukin urging repeatedly that loss of Black Widow not acceptable._

“Have you known all this time?” Natasha’s voice was lower than usual, raspy and cracked. She was looking down at the folder in her lap, sat on the wall, back turned on the glowing lights of the city at the foot of the mountain. Her face felt swollen, and she blinked more than usual to keep her vision clear. “Did you know that I’d find this when you first came to me?” 

_06-10-1972 Operation Winterschlaf completed. Vital signs stable and within normal range, brain scans show no signs of remaining instability or unpredictability. Traces of the surges of rage and violence of the subject displayed prior to memory deletion effectively extinguished; no reaction to any of the triggers identified over the past months._

_Unable to control violent hysteria in Black Widow after witnessing the procedure. Measures of force-feeding implemented for foreseeable future. Lukin citing funds to prevent loss of another agent through recalibrating the machine to modify memory rather than delete it. Calculated costs for temporary cryo-freeze until development of requested procedure is complete-_

“No,” he said, standing beside her and looking past her down at the city. “But I dreamt of you after I woke up. When we were... when I shot you through the shoulder. In my dreams I keep seeing you through the scope of my gun, and every time you open your mouth and before you can call my name, I pull the trigger and I scream and I wake up screaming. And I never... I never find out what my name is in the end.” 

Natasha could hear him scream in her head, the memory of the old reel etched in her brain. And there was the sound of her scream. 

_James_. 

“I’m so tired of not remembering,” he said, looking at her. “The dreams only get worse.” 

“Tell me.” She didn’t know why she said it, but he looked like he might answer. His shoulders pulled up and he seemed to sink into himself, brow creased.

“I feel... things, I feel myself holding a little girl’s hand and dragging her out of the fire, and the back of my neck is hot, and she is screaming. I remember choking children to death. I dream of you, I think, stabbing a man in the throat in the middle of a crowded room without anyone noticing. There’s always blood, always.” He paused, and she believed every word, though none of it sounded familiar to her. He tilted his head, as if a thought was striking him. “I dream of shooting out the tyres of your car. Did that... did it happen?” 

“Yes,” she said, smiling bitterly. “I remember that day. It was eight years ago.” 

“I dream of darkness sometimes,” he sounded almost like he was confessing a secret. “And it feels dangerous in the dream, like it’s forbidden, but... it’s peaceful. Waking up from it is excruciating and a thousand times worse than all the nightmares, and... I wish I wouldn’t.” 

Natasha didn’t speak, too caught up in the sound of his voice, the sound of him speaking. He had barely said a word in all the time they’d been on the same team, too aware of himself, too self-conscious to give anything away. 

“I think sometimes that when I wake up, that’s when I remember the moment,” he spoke, voice quiet and pained. “When he told me I’d never remember you again. Or me. I wake up and feel like I’m... irrevocably breaking. I have dreamed this moment so many times, and every time I wake up it feels like I... like all I know is that...” 

“That you were a whole human once, but can’t remember what it was like anymore,” Natasha finished and he averted his eyes. 

“All that’s left is the horror of that moment.” He swallowed. “I went to the museum in Washington DC, back before even the dreams started. And I saw this man from ninety years ago glaring at me from a wall, and I didn’t even realise until an hour later that I looked like him.” 

Natasha was about to reply, when Barnes grabbed her hand suddenly, and turned around in alarm. She frowned and was about to pull away, when an explosion shook the ground. 

She paled. 

“Clint!” She yelled, jumping off the wall and preparing to run, but Barnes held her back. 

“The comm,” he growled and Natasha mashed the button in her ear, stomach dropping when she only heard static for a second. 

“Clint, come in, what is going on?”

“ _Nat_ ,” Clint coughed, and Natasha’s knees weakened with relief. “ _You have to find Barnes and run_.”

“What’s happening?” 

“ _Doombots_ ,” Clint pressed out, and it sounded like he was running. “ _We took what we could and set fire to the rest. None of this needs to be in Doom’s hands. Especially not Barnes._ ” 

“Forget about Doom, just make sure you get out!” Natasha replied, already packing up the ledger on the wall beside them and checking they hadn’t dropped anything. She gestured to Barnes to be on alert while she shoved everything into her backpack. “Find somewhere safe; we’ll regroup tomorrow.” She paused. “Watch out for Jess.” 

“ _Copy that_.”

The comm went quiet and Natasha bit down on the flash of anxiety that had taken over her as she and Barnes started to run, skidding down slopes steep enough to break their necks, but unable to slow down. 

Clint was good at his job. He’d be fine. He always was. 

 

The dripping from the leaky tap echoed loudly under the high ceiling of the sparsely furnished bathroom, and Natasha pulled her legs up to hug them as the water around her slowly turned cool. The bathtub wasn’t big enough to stretch out, but now she barely took up half of it. 

She had forgotten the time in the quiet of the small, ransacked apartment they’d eventually settled in. Barnes was sleeping, had fallen asleep eventually, leaning against the head of the small bed next to her. Despite everything, she herself had been out like a light as soon as her head had hit the pillow. 

Dawn was creeping in through the window and the digits on her phone when it rang told her she’d been up for over an hour. Drying her hand on a towel, she took the call and put it on speakerphone. 

“Are you all right?” 

“ _Yeah_ ,” Clint’s tinny voice reached her ears. He sounded worn. “ _We found a place to crash. Jess had a rough night, I think, but she’s out now getting coffee; I thought I’d bring you up to speed_.” 

“Up to speed?” 

“ _Yeah, so the whole complex went up in flames last night_ ,” Clint said unhappily, and Natasha swiped a drop of water off her face that was making its way down her temple. The image of herself on the old reel blackening under fire was both disturbing and relieving. 

“It’s all gone, then?” 

“ _Not all of it_ ,” Clint replied, and the sound of running water was audible on his end of the line. “ _We managed to salvage some of it on the way out. It’s... Jess found Fennhoff’s personal diary from the early years until 1962. Nat, it’s... it’s about as bad as you’d expect_.” 

Natasha closed her eyes and sank back into the water, holding her breath as it closed over her face. She counted to ten before she re-emerged. 

“ _Nat? You still there?_ ” 

“I’m here,” she said, sweeping her hair back. “Tell me.” 

Clint took a deep breath. 

“ _Just as we guessed, Zola’s men found Barnes after he fell, but he was erratic and mentally unstable. When Zola met Fennhoff in prison they devised a plan to get Fennhoff out so he could use his hypnotising skills to brainwash Barnes into becoming a weapon for them to use. Even though Barnes couldn’t remember who he was after the fall, he retained fighting reflexes, muscle memory, language skills._ ” 

“He was already a weapon, they just didn’t know how to aim,” Natasha concluded, shivering a little in the water now. 

“ _What they did to him, Nat, it’s... the detail of description is horrifying_.”

“Did Jess read any of it?” 

“ _No_ ,” he said. “ _She picked it up because she hoped there’d be something on her father in there, but all of that happened decades later_.” 

“Don’t show her.” 

Jess didn’t need to know, hell, herself and Clint didn’t even need to know. She had half a mind of asking Clint to burn the diary. Or maybe give it to Barnes and let him decide what to do with it. 

Clint grunted something like assent.

“ _I’m not sure anyone should know any of it, for his own sake_ ,” he said, then cleared his throat, which sounded raspy and dry. “ _Zola’s plan, according to Fennhoff, was to use Barnes as a seemingly Soviet-controlled threat to the US and SHIELD, to facilitate his own recruitment into SHIELD_.”

“Which is why Fennhoff started working with the KGB.” It made perfect sense. 

“ _He might have had a hand in founding it, even_ ,” Clint threw in. “ _It doesn’t say exactly, but the dates do match, roughly. Fennhoff was working with what was left of Leviathan first, but we weren’t wrong about the Underwood woman being some form of pre-Red Room assassin. Hell, she might even have created the Red Room once Leviathan was inside the KGB._ ” 

She had created Natasha, in any case. Natasha stood and wrapped herself in a towel before stepping out of the bathtub. Sitting down again on the rim of the tub she wrapped her arms around herself, bracing for her next question. 

“Does it say anything about me?” 

Clint didn’t reply immediately. 

“ _Not really. You were a KGB agent paired up with Barnes in the early sixties to form a strike team,_ ” he eventually said. “ _Fennhoff doesn’t say anything about your... origins, birth date, or anything. But Barnes’ conditioning kept threatening to break down, presumably because of residual trauma from the fall and the war. He went rogue on a mission at some point and had to be contained for quite a while until they figured they would try to anchor him more thoroughly to his identity as an assassin. Let him develop some personality, so to speak_.” Clint hesitated. “ _I do hope he’s not standing next to you right now._ ” 

“No, he’s still asleep,” Natasha said, towelling her hair dry. “So what, they recruited me to be his... what?” 

“ _Trainee_ ,” Clint said, to her own surprise. “ _You were still a teenager, and the top graduate of the Red Room_.” Natasha felt shivers creep up her spine at the sound of the words and the horror at the truth in them. “ _It was decided that teaming you up would benefit both Fennhoff and the KGB, and ultimately HYDRA. Which, judging by the amount of missions you completed, wasn’t wrong._ ” 

“But how did Zola not know?” Natasha asked. “He had my birth year at 1984. He had to have known.” 

“ _Fennhoff wasn’t Zola’s dancing monkey_ ,” Clint replied. “ _He kept secrets from both HYDRA and the KGB. I believe you were only ever referred to as the Black Widow, an agent of the KGB, not HYDRA, so none of Zola’s concern. Nameless assassin, replaceable. Fennhoff was secretly picking up Zola’s old work on the super soldier serum, in cooperation with remaining Leviathan scientists and the KGB. He didn’t want Zola to know that, either, for whatever reason._ ” 

“The HYDRA has many heads,” Natasha said simply, remembering Jess’ description of internal warfare within HYDRA. Of course Fennhoff wouldn’t have wanted to put all of his eggs into one basket. 

“ _I can only assume that at some point you were given whatever form of the serum they had. And whatever happened later, they had all the technology to...to make you forget_ ,” Clint said, sounding sorry and a little sad. “ _I’m reaching here, though. The diary stops long before that. Anything could’ve happened._ ” 

Yeah, they’d fallen in love and been found out. Natasha almost said it, then decided not to. She could hear Barnes stir outside the door in the small room of the flat, and stood up, picking up her phone. 

“I have to go,” she said, hesitating. “Thank you, Clint. Listen, do me a favour and take Jess and get her somewhere safe? Barnes and I are going to do the same. We’ll regroup... somewhere, sometime. I don’t know. For now I think it’s safer if we don’t know, just get out without causing an international incident.” 

“ _Okay_ ,” Clint said, sounding like he wasn’t entirely convinced, but accepting the circumstances like a good sport. “I’ll beep your comm in an emergency. See you on the flipside, I guess.” 

“I mean it, Clint,” she said before hanging up. “Thank you. For being there. For everything.” 

“ _Always_.” 

When she left the bathroom, towels wrapped around her head and body, the floor cold under her bare feet, Barnes was twitching on the bed and his breath was laboured. His right arm was shaking, his left immobile, and his eyes pressed shut as he still sat upright, propped up against the headboard and fast asleep. Even across the small room Natasha thought she could sense the breath he took right before he’d wake up, screaming. 

Walking gingerly over to the bed she leaned down carefully and clasped a hand over his mouth when he gasped awake. 

“James,” she spoke into his ear. His breath was hitting her palm, hot and wet. His pulse was palpable under her fingertips, pounding beneath his skin. “It’s all right, James. You’re awake now.” 

His body stilled and sank back against the wall, the back of his head giving a quiet thud. His eyes followed her hand as she wiped the moisture of his breath into the sheets. There was a sadness in his eyes, and he was looking both at her and through her. 

“We can’t stay here for long. Latveria is on alert, and we’re really not allowed to be here.” 

“I understand,” he said, then paused. “The others, did they get out?” 

She hadn’t expected him to ask, and it touched her strangely that he did. She nodded. 

“Yes. They’re getting the hell out of dodge too. I talked to Clint.” Pulling the towel off her head, she sat down on the bed, looking at him. “They managed to take some of the files out with them, but... the rest of it is gone.” He swung his legs off the other side of the bed and nodded, back turned towards her as his feet touched the ground. “They found Fennhoff’s diary of the early days. I... I think you should probably have it. Even if you decide to destroy it, I think... it’s yours to keep.” 

“Does he know?” Barnes asked, standing up and turning to face her again. He glanced past her and she followed his gaze to the ledger sticking out of her backpack. 

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Depends on what else they found, or took away. He’s not stupid, though, he might figure it out anyway.” 

“Do you wish you hadn’t found out?” There was an edge to his voice. When she didn’t reply, he added. “Because I think maybe it would have been better if it had all stayed buried. Nothing has been solved, nothing... it’s just been getting worse and worse.” He sounded bitter, and Natasha didn’t know what to say.

He wasn’t wrong. Before, in the bathtub, she had thought for a while that she might drown with the pain of the weight that was pressing on her shoulders, unexpected and unforeseen and irreversible. 

She had aged overnight, and today she was seventy years old.

There were roughly fifty years’ worth of death in her ledger now. It was blood to rival biblical proportions. 

“There’s no regretting it now,” she said into the silence, standing up too. “We can’t undo it. And we can’t undo anything that happened, either, no matter if we remember it or not.” 

Maybe one day, she thought cynically, she’d believe it herself. 

“So what’s the point of finding out what happened?” 

Natasha considered for a while, then slowly said, heat rising in her chest at the thought,

“Because we’re not the only ones who know now.”


	10. The Mother of Monsters

“This isn’t the way I’d have chosen to do it,” Barnes muttered when the engine fell quiet, and Natasha sighed and leaned back in the passenger’s seat to grab the bag of groceries from the back seat. 

“Agreed, but unfortunately this is the smarter way to go about it,” she said, while pulling out the cork of the bottle of wine out with a small pocket knife that she’d found in the glove compartment. She took a gulp, then offered it to Barnes, who shook his head. Shrugging, she tossed a bag of chips at him before opening one for herself.

Barnes seemed a different person, Natasha thought when they had parked their car in an abandoned shed in a random field half a day’s drive from Moscow. The restlessness that she’d seen in Latveria was still there, under the surface of what she’d come to know as his gameface. It wasn’t a sense of helpless frustration that had always cast a shadow on him before, it was less wild now, but no less intense. 

He was maybe more of a killer now than he’d ever been before. 

“We have to be careful,” Natasha said, not for the first time, putting her legs up on the dashboard. Barnes had pushed the driver’s seat back just to get some more leg space, but made sure to be able to start the car and drive off at a moment’s notice. His eyes were closed, though she could tell he wasn’t asleep. He was ignoring his bag of chips. 

“The woman might be old,” she continued, “but we can’t forget she’s working with someone who isn’t. And we are practically out of ammo. Or actually, I am completely out of ammo.”

“The woman might also be dead,” he pointed out. “The shooter might have been after her last time, and we simply got in the way.” 

“Well, we won’t know until we get there,” Natasha said. Chips and wine wasn’t her idea of a good dinner, but neither was waiting out the day in a shed. Or stealing pants a size too small from a laundromat because most of her clothes had been left behind either in Russia or Latveria whenever they’d had to make a run for it.

“I have been thinking,” Barnes began after a while, taking an interest in his own bag of chips. “I came to talk to you because I had nightmares.” He picked a chip out of the bag and contemplated it for a moment before shoving it into his mouth. “How did they know? At which point did they join the show?” 

“It’s a good question,” Natasha conceded, chewing thoughtfully. “You had a tail when you came to find me, though.” 

“So did you,” he replied, and she shrugged.

“Mine was better than yours, admittedly. Bet let’s see, someone got to the base in Romania before I did, the one I went to after Kazakhstan, and they cleared out a hidden vault to make sure I didn’t find anything. Then we went to Russia, and Lukin dropped dead three feet away from me, and I never got to find out what knew, either.” 

“You’re saying you think they didn’t mean for us to find out what we did in Latveria?” He asked, sounding unconvinced, and she looked at him for a long moment. It was a tempting thought, but... 

“No. I rather feel like we’ve been led on all this time, to be honest. At every turn, we were given just enough to keep searching, and I was too tempted to let it stop me. And now I don’t know.” She took another gulp of wine. “I still have a feeling that we’re doing exactly what we’re supposed to do.” 

“You think it’s a trap,” he said and she snorted. 

“Yeah. Which is why I think we shouldn’t barge into this.” 

“What would they want with me?” Barnes asked and Natasha raised an eyebrow at him. He held her gaze. “It’s not like HYDRA hasn’t been after me since I... left. And I know your teammates have been looking for me, too. And just about everyone else who knows I exist. To bring me in, or wipe me out, or just make me disappear for the next fifty years.” 

He stuffed a handful of chips into his mouth and stared ahead for a moment.

“I just don’t know which it is with them.” 

“Maybe they’re not after you,” Natasha said, shrugging when he turned to look at her. “That old woman was the mother of the Red Room. She more or less created me. For all we know this is payback for failing her fifty years ago.” 

“She could just have you killed, then,” he pointed out, taking the bottle of wine from her hands. Eyeing him taking a couple of large gulps, she wondered briefly if he could get drunk, or if whatever Zola had done to him made him resistant to inebriation just like Steve. He was certainly made of sturdy stuff when it came to tranquilisers. 

“Maybe that was her plan when we met her,” she said, taking the fairly empty bottle back from him. “The odds weren’t exactly in my favour against you.”

She could get drunk, though, she mused. Not easily, but she could. She felt the buzz of the wine, just a little, and Barnes had let out a long, content breath when he’d swallowed his last gulp. Maybe whatever he had been given had resembled her own formula more than Steve’s. 

Soviet made. 

“Maybe she wanted to see me suffer first. Whatever, I guess we’ll find out.” She wrapped herself more tightly into her – stolen – jacket. It wasn’t that chilly, but the temperatures inside the car would drop as the engine grew cold, and while the day outside the shed wasn’t bad by Russian standards, it was overcast with a chance of rain. “We should get some sleep. Couple of hours, and then we try to make Moscow by nightfall.” 

He nodded, still absent-mindedly eating his chips. 

She had already closed her eyes, and long minutes of silence passed. Finally, he said, sounding as if he needed to have the last word on a conversation long finished,

“We didn’t fail.” There was a hint of bitterness in his voice, and she could hear him shift in his seat as he settled in more comfortably. “We were ratted out.” 

Natasha didn’t reply, but the young, innocent face of Yelena Belova was hovering in her mind as she fell asleep. He wasn’t wrong. 

 

It was strange to work with Barnes, if you could call it work. He was quiet, and Natasha realised to her surprise that she wasn’t used to quiet. Clint hardly ever shut up, with his habit of bouncing ideas off of people and thinking aloud to make sure everybody felt included. Working with the Avengers was a chatty business too, but Natasha understood that moving as a team required sharing thoughts and intentions in the field, so it never really struck her as out of place. 

Barnes, though, was entirely still most of the times. He didn’t fidget or shift out of discomfort, didn’t think aloud, and used tight and precise gestures to signal his movements. Once he was on a mission, it was almost as if he had eyes on the back of his head.

They both knew the building was empty when they reached the apartment of Lyudmila Kudrin, its front door still gone and only hastily closed up with tarp and some tape. 

“Well, we won’t find out if it’s a trap unless we let it snap shut,” Natasha finally muttered after they’d listened and considered the tarp for a couple of minutes. 

The apartment, when they stepped into it, looked unchanged from when they’d last been there. The shards of glass from the window were still there, scattered across the old carpeting, interspersed with the remains of the table Barnes had crashed onto. 

A breeze from the window moved the tarp behind them, and for a second Natasha listened intently, her back stiffening with apprehension. Barnes tilted his head ever so slightly, ears perked. 

When there were no further sounds of movement, she stepped over the broken glass towards the old woman’s bedroom, which looked just like when they’d last seen it. There wasn’t much in it besides the bed, a chair, which was still toppled over from when Barnes had lost his control, a small closet and a low chest that contained spare bedlinen. The entire room smelled of old things, and Natasha’s skin felt dry and tight. 

“She said,” Barnes began, and Natasha turned to see him look at a picture of dancers on the wall, “That her granddaughter was dancing in the Bolshoi.” 

Natasha paused, then shook her head. 

“Guess she likes her jokes.” 

Natasha didn’t usually dwell on the memories she’d always known to be fake; the days spent practicing penchès and pirouettes, and the nights of putting raw meat on her toes. The dream of becoming a ballerina for the Bolshoi. She wondered, why this was the story that had been chosen for her. Why this false childhood, and not any other? 

She crouched down by the bed to look at the photographs pinned to the wall just above the nightstand. They were old, and the Lyudmila Kudrin depicted in them looked barely fifty. The blonde girl in the picture beside her hadn’t hit puberty yet. 

“Guess now we know what happened to the rat,” Natasha said, taking the photograph off the pin that held it to the wall and turning to Barnes to show him. He himself was holding something too, and when his eyes fell to the picture in Natasha’s hand, he wordlessly extended the one in his. 

It showed an older Yelena Belova, still recognisably the child whose picture had been in the file, but with sharper features, her eyes more calculating, and her gaze less wide and innocent. The curve of her mouth was the same, and in the teenager’s enigmatic smile Natasha recognised the woman that had made the child look so familiar in the first place. 

Looking back at the picture of the young girl Yelena together with Lyudmila, Natasha noticed the building in the background, and the bright letters above the entrance that were reflected in the river that ran by the side of the building. 

Богомо́ловые, the Praying Mantis. 

“It was her all along,” she breathed, looking at Barnes. “She led us on every step of the way.” 

He didn’t reply, instead turned his head when something hit the floor in the living room with a thud and a hiss tore through the silence in the apartment. 

“Cover!” He yelled, slamming the door shut before the dull wave of an explosion knocked them over. 

When she opened her eyes again, Natasha was instinctively kicking at the debris around her feet, her head reeling and ears ringing. Her balance was off-centre and it felt like the floor was moving around her. There was a pain in her lungs and her brain was throbbing. 

She could hear coughing and tried to get a look at Barnes a couple of feet away from her, but her vision was too blurry to make out more than general movement. Wood was cracking and the walls around them seemed to groan. It hadn’t been that devastating an explosive, and she hoped that it wasn’t enough to bring any walls down around them. 

She tried to grab for something to pull herself to her feet, but her fingers kept slipping. When she scrambled to her knees, she felt a sting in her hip where she’d landed on it, and her groan of pain turned into a cough. 

“Barnes, get up,” she rasped, blinking against the dust, and the heat of the air around them. She crawled over to him to grab him by the back of his collar - the first thing she could wrap her fingers around - and pull him upright. There was blood on his cheek, but his eyes focused on hers when they met. Without answering, he got to his feet and began to step through the ruined door into the next room, kicking the remains of furniture out of the way. 

The carpet was burnt black and felt hot even through the soles of her shoes. There were wooden floorboards underneath that cracked with every step, and Natasha was glad when they had made it out into the staircase. 

She had to steady herself on the railing on the way down the first flight, the smell of ash and burnt synthetic fibre sharp in her mouth. 

“There’s someone in the building,” Barnes suddenly said, stopping and leaning over the bannister to look down. His head snapped back reflexively at the crack of a gunshot, and he covered his face with his hand, his jaw tight as he bit down on the pain, shoving Natasha back up the stairs. “Go!”

They took two steps at a time despite their aching limbs, and across her shoulder, Natasha could see a black shadow two floors below, moving faster than they did, catching up with them every second. 

“Shooter,” Barnes muttered, wiping the blood off his forehead where the bullet had grazed him. They had passed the flat of the old woman and made their way further up to the roof. Natasha thought she remembered a fire escape coming down the side of the building. Not that whoever was after them - and she was beginning to get a pretty good idea who - wouldn’t also have taken that into account, but if they were fast enough... 

“Go,” Barnes grunted when he’d broken the lock on the trapdoor that led up to the roof, and Natasha crawled past him on the ladder to get out.

The air on the roof was fresh and Natasha’s lungs were utterly grateful for it when she pulled herself up onto the flat roof. Barnes followed close behind her, blood already caking on his face. 

There was no way of sealing the trapdoor from the outside, once they’d broken the lock, so Barnes stood on it while Natasha located the fire escape. 

“You go ahead,” he said, nodding at Natasha’s gun, loaded with her final two bullets, stuck into her waistband. “I’ll keep her busy.” 

“I’ll cover you once I’m on the ground,” Natasha replied, looking sceptically at the wound on his forehead. He had to have a concussion; if not from the explosion, then from almost getting a bullet to the head. “Don’t be a hero.” 

“I’m not a hero,” he muttered, strengthening his stance when the door under his feet started to groan and shake as something was rammed up against it with blunt force. 

Natasha made her way to the ladder that led down one side of the building and was just about to start climbing down when she heard a muted gunshot and saw from the corner of her eye how Barnes had ripped out the metal door underneath him to use it as a shield instead. 

“Go!” he yelled, when he slammed himself into the limber figure that was coming up through the trapdoor, dressed in black and face masked. The shooter half dodged his assault and her next shot barely missed his knee. 

Natasha took a deep breath to fight the vertigo that was muddling her concussed brain, then started to climb down the ladder as fast as she could. She felt dizzy, and the ladder was rattling with every step, as if threatening to break straight off the building at any moment. She could hear more gunshots above and halted for a moment, looking up and half expecting to find a barrel pointed down at her head, before reminding herself to continue on down. 

The force of a second explosion on the roof shook the building and Natasha could see Barnes half jump, half being flung over the edge of the building by its shockwave. 

The fire escape gave a violent jerk around her, and her foot slipped. 

Clawing at the metal bars, she suddenly realised she was falling; along with the fire escape itself. There were maybe two or three storeys between her and the ground. 

Head spinning, she closed her eyes almost out of reflex and prepared for impact, when someone grabbed her around the waist and swept her aside. 

Her feet touched solid ground ten seconds later, and she was being pulled away from the building, down the street and into a back alley. 

“What are you doing here?” she blurted out when they finally stopped, and Jess raised an eyebrow, breathing fast. 

“Saving your ass, that’s what.” 

“How did you know where we were?” 

“Well, it wasn’t that hard to figure out,” Jess replied, scanning the surrounding rooftops and looking back where they’d come. “We just put two and two together, really.” 

We. She wasn’t alone, of course. 

“Thank you,” Natasha said, taking deep breaths to clear the fog from her mind and calm down her body. She was regaining her balance and straightened up, mentally going through all the parts of her body that hurt and deciding it could have been worse. “Where is Clint?” 

“Somewhere up there,” Jess gestured at the roofs. “Finding Barnes and making sure he’s all right. If he doesn’t show up in two minutes, we’ll leave and meet up at the rendezvous point. How well can you run?” 

 

By the time Clint and Barnes finally made it to the abandoned garage Jess had parked their car in, Natasha’s head felt okay again and her hip had stopped stinging with every step. It had never occurred to her that she healed so fast; she’d ascribed it to her training to ignore and suppress pain, rather than any actual physiological advantage. 

Barnes’ forehead had healed entirely, and he looked less fatigued than Clint, who let himself fall onto a nearby surface and let out a long groan. 

“I’m getting too old for this shit.” 

There was a moment’s pause in which Natasha and Barnes exchanged a pointed look before turning to Clint, who had stopped rubbing his temples and realised just what he’d said. Sitting back up, he rolled his eyes. 

“Forget I said anything.” He looked at Natasha and Jess. “You all right?” 

“Yeah,” Natasha said, and Jess nodded. “What about the shooter?” 

“Dropped a hallucinogenic arrow at his feet,” Clint shrugged, flexing his shoulders and grimacing at Jess’ bewildered stare. “Excuse me, we’ve been on the run for a while now, and the black market on custom arrowheads isn’t exactly booming. It got him off our trail, at least.” 

“Her,” Natasha corrected and pulled the photograph of Yelena Belova that she’d shoved into the back pocket of her jeans on the way out of the apartment. Clint whistled, as he passed the picture on to Jess, who looked down at the young woman’s face, seemingly unimpressed. 

Barnes dropped their backpacks to the floor and Natasha realised that he and Clint had to have made a detour to their own safehouse to pick up the things they’d brought with them from Latveria. The ledgers that hadn’t burned. 

“I hate to sound like we’re some kind of team here, but do we have a plan?” Jess asked, contemplating the photograph of the young blonde woman. “What’s the angle with her?” 

“Yelena Belova,” Natasha explained, finding somewhere to sit down too. “She was trained by the same... institution that trained me. The old woman from the apartment was the head of the whole operation. I didn’t recognise her,” she added, smirking humourlessly, “because it was a hella fucked up institution.” 

“Oh yeah, that I believe,” Jess said dryly, and tossed Clint the keys to the car so he could get food and water out of the trunk. 

“She contacted you,” Barnes said slowly, looking at Natasha. “Yelena. I followed you home from the opera that night and you were walking with her.” 

Clint coughed when he got water down the wrong pipe, and Natasha rolled her eyes.

“It was part of the cover. Ask Maria.” She looked at Barnes. “I already knew you were there. I was waiting for you to make a move before I had to make one on my own mission.” 

“Any idea what she wanted?” Clint asked, heaving a breath after gulping down half a bottle of water in one go. “Did she say anything suspicious, or hint at what her intentions were?” 

“No,” Natasha said slowly, trying to remember. “Well. She invited me to the ballet, and she said she was a ballerina when she was young.” There was a version of Natasha that had been a ballerina, too. She shook her head and laughed mirthlessly. “She was flawless. I couldn’t have done it better myself.” 

“Well, whatever she wanted, I think we can agree that she shouldn’t be out there, right?” Jess said loudly, looking at all of them. When they all looked at her impassively, she added, “I mean, she shot that KGB guy and detonated a bomb on the Red Square. And two hours ago she tried to kill the two of you - again. I say we take her down and ask questions about her intentions later... Avengers code of honour or not.” 

“I gotta say I agree,” Clint remarked and Jess almost looked surprised, and oddly mollified in the way she stole his bottle of water to take a sip. Clint let her and instead stood to get back to rummaging around in the trunk. “But we have to find her first. And we need a plan. If she’s been ahead of us all this time, it’s not going to be easy getting the jump on her.” 

“I know where to find her,” Natasha threw in. “All I need is a laptop and some internet.”

“You’ll also need these,” Clint said and tossed something at her. She caught it and turned it over in her fingers. It was spare ammo for her Widow’s Bite and her gun. The next thing he tossed at her was her uniform. 

“Where did you get all of that?” she asked and he shrugged, grinning at Jess.

“Picked stuff up after you for a change, on our way out of Latveria. We couldn’t really leave it there for Doom to find, could we?” 

He continued to unearth things from a large duffel bag, and eventually cleared his throat awkwardly and turned to Barnes. 

“I guess this is yours, man,” he said, handing him a simple black notebook, which Natasha knew had to be Fennhoff’s diary. “I don’t know. Burn it, or... just... whatever, I guess.” 

Barnes nodded and looked at the book for a long moment, then put it away into his own backpack without opening it. 

“Also, I know we’re not quite the same size,” Clint continued, more cheerfully now. He gestured at Barnes’ worn attire before throwing a bundle of clothes at him. “But I thought you could probably use a change of clothes.” 

“Thank you,” Barnes said, sounding stunned and a little out of his depth.

Clint was such a dad, Natasha realised with a flash of fondness that was followed by the sting of guilt that she’d dragged him into the whole mess in the first place.


	11. Corps de Ballet

“You came alone. I knew you would.” 

Natasha’s back stiffened. There she was, her profile outlined against the window, the bright neon letters on the outside of the building lighting up the entire upper floor. The ground floor had been empty, and so was the large room she now stood in, half the windows sealed up and all furniture gone. It had been a warehouse once, turned into a bar, or a dance club, judging by the floor and the openness of the space. A dance club amidst warehouses by the river, nightlife without the worry of disturbing anyone. 

Now it seemed only to be waiting to be torn down, empty carcass of a building.

Natasha stepped towards the old woman. 

“It’s me you want, isn’t it?” she replied, thoughts briefly flitting to Jess and Clint and Barnes, who had all been asleep when she’d left their hideout. 

When the old woman didn’t react, Natasha tilted her head to listen closely. She had no doubts that there was one other person in the building. 

“Take your shot, then.” 

“My dear child!” The old woman was sitting in a wheelchair, and Natasha took a careful step towards her. The garish green light etched the lines in her face even deeper, but her eyes were focused and sharp. 

“Why would I want to kill you?” she asked, looking Natasha up and down. “You were my first. You were the best out of all of them.” 

“I was the only one who survived,” she said coldly, remembering the picture of Kudrin surrounded by little girls. All the little girls with death dates before the age of ten. 

Kudrin chuckled before turning serious. 

“What do you think all the others died of?” she replied, her voice cold enough to run chills down Natasha’s spine. “You may not remember them now, but you were there to bury all of them, late at night, hidden in the mountains. You were children; you all thought we didn’t know what happened to your bodies.” 

“What do you mean?” Natasha asked, transfixed on the old woman now, something inside her chest fluttering with horror. She thought of her childhood, the one she remembered, in an anonymous building in Moscow.

“Oh, you didn’t recognise it when you went back there,” Kudrin replied. “Of course, the old main building is gone now, and I didn’t think they would let you remember, after everything that happened there. But the graveyard is still in bloom every year.” She shifted in her wheelchair, eyes focused on Natasha’s. “You carved each of your initials into the rock, the victor and the vanquished. Your final place in the world.” 

Hundreds of hearts, Natasha realised. Not lovers. Hundreds of little girls who had all killed each other, except for the few who had died of something else. Sickness, weakness, maybe suicide... And her, who had survived. 

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, taking a step back out of impulse. “Why am I here?” 

“Because you needed to know the injustice that was done to you,” Kudrin said, her voice angry. “To all of us. How they wasted you, HYDRA and the men in the Red Room, after I gave them the greatest assassin the motherland had ever seen. They ruined you, and then they discarded you and gave you up to the Americans and SHIELD.” She turned her wheelchair to face Natasha more directly. “They told me you were dead, you know. That you didn’t survive the procedure. Years later, kill orders were placed on all my girls, and I was put aside to die in squalor. They said my time, our time, was over.”

Natasha swallowed. She had once been told the same thing, by Aleksandr Lukin. The time of human intelligence was over, the time of computers had made her obsolete. A year later, she’d chosen Clint over her suicide mission and had decided that yes, that time was over. 

“All your girls?” she asked, her throat feeling very dry all of a sudden. 

“You were the first,” Kudrin said, and there was bitterness in her voice. “After the Red Room became a part of Department X, they wanted many. So I trained them, and they were magnificent. Each and every one of them. From the first,” she nodded at Natasha, before her eyes looked past her, “to the last.” 

There was the faintest whisper of fabric, the tapping of a soft sole on the hard floor, and Natasha didn’t need to turn around to sense the presence of the third woman in the room. 

“It was you who betrayed me,” she said, watching Kudrin’s face even as she spoke to Yelena behind her. “I was tortured, brainwashed, and discarded because of _you_.” 

“Department X betrayed you,” the old woman shook her head, “The Winter Soldier was always going to fail, and he took you down with him. You were wronged by dead men who couldn’t see what you were worth on your own. The same men that would have my daughters kill each other for their gain. Like I killed my sisters to prove myself to men long before you were born.” 

“The Red Room, the KGB, HYDRA and SHIELD are all gone now,” Yelena said suddenly, and Natasha tilted her head only just to see her the brightness of her hair in the corner of her eye. “But we are still here. You and me, and twenty-six of our sisters.” 

_I have more sisters than most people probably think is healthy_ she’d told Natasha long ago, in a different world in which they had been women free to go to the ballet. Where neither of them had the blood of children on their hands. 

“When you took down SHIELD and HYDRA,” Lyudmila continued, and her old eyes suddenly wandered and refocused on something at the back of the room. Natasha’s hands turned into fists. “The world became ready for the taking. But you needed to see first. You had to know the truth about who you really are.” 

_I am no-one_ , Natasha remembered her own words, _I have no place in this world_. And it was true in that moment more than ever before in her life. The past she remembered was as unreal as the all the pasts she’d ever created for herself. _I have no place in this world_. There was nowhere to belong, not now and never before. 

Except for a fleeting moment. 

Natasha turned around to face Yelena. She was beautiful and deadly, armed to the teeth with concealed weapons, and Natasha had never met anyone who had been so like herself, so equally marred and shaped by what it meant to become the Black Widow. 

Behind Yelena, at the back of the room, Natasha could see Barnes, utterly still and barely visible in the shadows, only his arm reflecting ghostly the green light that was coming in through the window. She couldn’t make out his face, but she could feel his eyes on her. 

It had never been about him at all. The fact that he had come to her was insubstantial; Yelena would have been there regardless, one step ahead all the way, right up to this moment. 

Yelena was looking back over her shoulder with a small smirk on her face. She looked at Natasha. 

“I know you resent him. Don’t lie; I can see it. He is in every failure of your life.” 

Natasha swallowed around the lump in her throat.

“So are you.” 

“I was meant to replace you from day one,” Yelena said gently. “They knew he had corrupted you, so they started training twenty girls to become their new Black Widow. But none of the other girls had what it took to get the job done when you came to the facility that night.”

_Subject denies involvement in the burning down of the facility and the connected death of twenty-six inhabitants._

“We saved you,” Natasha said. “You were just a child, and everyone else we found was dead. He pulled you from the fire.” 

“I was the one who started the fire,” Yelena corrected. “I knew you were coming across the mountains. The order was to take you down, and I knew I was meant to be the one to do it. I was going to be the last one standing, the one to succeed you.” She paused. “It’s what you’d have done. Black Widow.” 

Barnes took a step forward the same second Natasha did, then froze when their eyes connected across the room. Natasha held his gaze for a long moment before looking at Yelena, who was close enough to be almost in her space now. 

“Except,” Natasha leaned in slowly, her voice an intimate whisper. “I wouldn’t have failed.” 

It was the blink of an eye, and Yelena’s knife missed Barnes by a breath as she flung it at his chest. Natasha’s body froze, hands still clasping Yelena’s arm to throw off her aim, and the sound of a gunshot was followed by the sudden sting of the bullet in her side. Her knees buckled and she let go of Yelena, who sneered and knocked her elbow into Natasha’s jaw.

As she went down Natasha saw the gun in Lyudmila’s hand, and the bitter disappointment on her face. 

“What a waste,” Lyudmila said, her voice cold, and Natasha spat out at her when she felt herself being grabbed by the collar from behind. 

“Not too late to finish the job,” Yelena hissed, and Natasha gasped and grabbed at her neck to keep from choking. Her legs were slow, paralysed with the pain in her side. Stars were beginning to appear before her eyes, when she was suddenly dropped and fell to the floor, coughing. 

Barnes had crossed the room and was swinging at Yelena, and there were sparks in the air when another one of Yelena’s blades cut across his metal arm. Barnes barely blinked at her attack and took the blade off Yelena in a swift and precise movement. 

What worried Natasha was that Yelena didn’t look half as scared as she should have, going up against the Winter Soldier who so clearly was gaining the upper hand. 

Trying to scramble to her knees, Natasha’s legs kept slipping out from under her, and her hand was wet with her own blood as she pressed it onto the gunshot wound. 

“James,” she croaked out, watching Barnes be led across the room by the fight. She was luring him away from the old woman and Natasha, towards the staircase. It had to be a trap, it had to be- 

“He was never worth your compassion. Or your pity,” Lyudmila’s voice reached her ears, and she turned around to see the old woman aim her gun at Barnes’ retreating form in the dim across the room. . 

“No!” Natasha pressed out, struggling to hold herself upright. 

There was pity on Lyudmila’s face when she changed her aim and pointed the gun at Natasha instead. 

Looking down the barrel, Natasha’s breath hitched, and her whole body seemed to be pounding along with her raging heartbeat, from the throbbing in her hip to the rushing of blood in her ears. 

It took her a moment to realise that Lyudmila wasn’t moving, either, and not out of her own volition. Instead, she was staring at Natasha with wide eyes, terror etched into her lined face, her index finger hovering above the trigger, frozen in mid-air. Her old body shook when she heaved a forced breath. 

Jess landed soundlessly behind the old woman, her face tight and focused. Natasha thought she could feel the cold breath of fear radiate from her body, and she pressed her hand harder onto her wound. Jess walked around the wheelchair from behind, and reached out to take the gun from the woman’s stiff, old hand, and to point it back at her. Lyudmila stared up at her, terror struck, and for a moment Natasha thought Jess was going to stop her heart. 

“Jess...” A groan escaped her own throat as she sat up, and Jess turned from Lyudmila to kneel beside Natasha. She pulled an injection device from her pocket and jabbed it into Natasha’s lower abdomen. 

“Turns out Clint isn’t so paranoid after all,” she muttered and Natasha released a deep sigh when the pain rapidly left her limbs. She got to her knees and put a hand on Jess’ shoulder to heave herself up to a stand. Her fingers were picking at the wound now that the pain was gone, trying to pry the bullet from her flesh. Her suit was more or less bullet proof; it was the close range that had done the damage and the bullet hadn’t gone very deep. 

“Not sure this is a good idea,” Jess said, steadying Natasha and eyeing the blood on her uniform when Natasha drew out the bullet by the tip of her fingernail. Jess moved her hand to hover above the wound and looked at Natasha’s face before zapping her with a flash of electric current in an attempt to cauterize it. “This is really not how my skills work.”

“Thought you couldn’t get any cooler,” Natasha grunted and Jess raised an eyebrow. 

“Says you, who just pulled a bullet from her body while fully conscious.” 

“You hung upside down from the ceiling,” Natasha pressed out, noticing how her body was flooded by endorphins. She forced a grateful smile onto her face for Jess. “That’s a better entrance than I’ll ever have.” 

A loud bang and the sound of falling rocks turned their heads. 

Barnes and Yelena were no longer in the room, had to have left to wherever the noise was coming from, and Natasha steeled herself, nodding down at the gun in Jess’ hand. 

“You’ll be all right?” When Jess nodded, she added, quietly. “Her death won’t fix anything.” 

Jess wasn’t a killer, and Natasha would never have forgiven herself if she’d become one now, on account of this mission.

“We’re the good guys. I know,” Jess replied, rolling her eyes a little, and holding her hand out to Natasha, who took the small commlink and put it in her ear. 

“You’ve betrayed your own,” Lyudmila spat out, hatred in her eyes when she looked up at Natasha, who was turning to leave. “All the things we could have been, and the Black Widow chooses to be a pawn.” 

Natasha looked at her, and suddenly struggled to see past the image of a bitter, old, and broken woman in a wheelchair. Behind her, another small explosion was audible. 

“The Black Widow is an Avenger now.” 

 

Natasha was on her way to the stairs back down, running as fast as she could to catch up with the sound of fighting ahead, when the rumbling of thunder descended onto her from above, and she looked up just in time to see the staircase come down on her head. Her feet stopped dead and her arms were flailing in an attempt to reverse her momentum and to keep from diving headfirst into the rubble. 

Someone grabbed her belt from behind, and her balance shifted when she was pulled back and thrust away from the collapsing concrete onto safe ground. 

“You don’t look like you should be walking around,” Clint said, coughing and grimacing at the long cut down his left arm. Something had hit him on his way- 

“Where did you come from?” she asked, and he nodded upwards. 

“I was coming down through the roof and she blew the steps right out under my ass.” He sounded grim, and shook his head as he took his quiver to shake the dust and small pieces of rock out of it. He had one good arrow left. “Nat-”

A loud snarl was audible from below, and Clint’s face hardened as he slung his quiver back over his shoulder and gripped his bow tighter. Natasha’s eyes widened.

“Barnes,” they breathed in unison, and Natasha pushed herself away from the wall she was resting against to hurry back to the gaping hole where there staircase had been. 

Barnes was ten feet below them, blood streaming down his neck as he was caught standing half buried in rubble, trying to tear his left arm free from under the rocks. 

His eyes were fixed on Yelena, who had been hit and was bleeding herself, but who was standing free, panting hard and slowly raising her gun. She aimed it right at his head, and a lesser shot than her wouldn’t have missed at this distance.

Clint had pierced the back of her hand with his last arrow before Natasha could catch her breath to speak, and Yelena screamed out, dropping her gun and clasping her hand with fury on her face. Her eyes spotted Natasha and Clint above them, and she stumbled back out of Clint’s range. 

Her retreating footsteps were audible, as Natasha and Clint made their way down to help Barnes, who had begun to push at the rock that immobilised his metal arm. 

Natasha crawled across the debris to help him, then looked after Yelena’s limping form making her way to the door. 

“She’s getting out of here,” she muttered, and Clint, who was digging at the rocks around Barnes’ legs, pulling one of them free, looked alarmed. 

“Shit, shit, shit...” 

When Natasha looked at him, he swallowed to wet his throat. 

“Nat, I was about to tell you. This whole building is rigged with C4. And I don’t mean the cute small portions that took down the staircase, I mean a whole orchestra of ka-boom, all set to blow at the push of a button.”

And Natasha had a good guess who was holding that button. 

“You need to get out of here,” she said, standing and brushing off her legs perfunctorily. Stumbling off the mountain of rubble, she looked at Barnes, who was throwing his whole weight against the rock on his arm now that his second leg had gotten free, and then Clint. “Get Jess and the old woman, and run as far as you can.” 

“Natasha!” Barnes growled. “Don’t!” 

“I will state for the record that you’ve been shot,” Clint said pointedly, watching unhappily as Natasha checked her gauntlets for damage and took her gun off her belt.

“Yeah, and I’ll be shooting back in a minute,” she said, already walking towards the exit.

“Next time Steve gets himself the Swiss cheese treatment, you better be real quiet about it,” Clint called after her, and he was trying not to sound like he was worried. 

“Noted,” Natasha said, gritting her teeth when she fell into a slow run. 

The area outside was deserted this late at night and all the surrounding warehouses were dark. The river was running by quietly; its smooth surface undisturbed. The only thing moving in the gentle breeze was Yelena’s white blonde hair. 

She stood slightly crooked, keeping too much weight off her right leg, but facing Natasha head on. She had removed the arrow, and her gun hand was bleeding and held at her side. 

“Do you think it’ll make a difference?” Yelena called when Natasha raised her gun. “You don’t have what it takes to pull that trigger anymore.” 

Natasha halted and swayed where she stood for a moment, mere feet away from the other woman. She contemplated her face for a moment, before her finger pressed down on the trigger. 

It was jammed; she’d expected as much, and she was prepared for Yelena’s attack when it came.

Dodging without so much as a scratch on her suit, Natasha pushed forward, landing a blow on Yelena’s wounded arm with the butt of the gun, only to receive a hit to her side in return. The pain knocked the breath out of her for a heartbeat, and her hand shot up to keep Yelena from garrotting her from where she’d jumped onto Natasha’s back. 

“I should have been you,” Yelena snarled. “I deserved everything you were too weak to be!” 

“You’re gonna have to try harder, then,” Natasha coughed when she threw her off, slinging the garrotte to the side and setting after Yelena, who had pulled yet another knife from her the inside of her boot and swung it wide to keep Natasha at bay before getting back to her feet and attacking again. 

She was good, Natasha thought, unsurprised. As good as she herself had ever been. 

She slammed her elbow into Yelena’s jaw and smelled the tang of fresh blood. 

Natasha herself was beginning to waver on her feet, and her stance became less steady the more blood continued to trickle out of the wound at her hip that had reopened. 

“There’ll be an army of us,” Yelena panted, spitting blood. “An army of Black Widows.” 

“There’s only one Black Widow,” Natasha replied, straightening up and advancing, slowly but steadily. “And that’s me.”

“Not much longer.”

“Bet you said that forty years ago,” Natasha pressed out, hearing her gauntlets crack under the sharp blade of Yelena’s knife. 

They had moved close to the water, and the wind had picked up, tearing at their hair and weakening limbs. 

Natasha fell back and landed hard on her behind when Yelena kicked her in the chest, and she scrambled backwards, excruciating pain shooting up her leg and wounded hip. Struggling to block Yelena’s advance, she noticed the flash of metal and movement in the corner of her eyes. 

Yelena had spotted it too. Her throw was quick and precise, and Barnes, who had come running out of the building with murder on his face, crumpled to the ground fifty feet away from them with a loud groan. The knife had missed his heart, but was embedded to the hilt in his loin, and he curled in on himself on the floor, arms gripping the hilt of the knife, but unable to move it. 

“I’ve never actually seen anything this pathetic,” Yelena commented casually, disregarding Barnes’ moans of pain and instead taking a step closer to Natasha, who was still on the ground and scrambling away from the blond woman. Natasha’s eyes were darting back and forth between Yelena and Barnes. Barnes was looking back at her, one hand now fumbling at the back of his combat vest. 

Yelena was focused on Natasha, her brow knit in contemplation. 

“Natasha,” Barnes croaked out to the side, and Natasha reached out in his direction almost unconsciously, still kicking the ground to try and bring distance between herself and Yelena. Barnes’ arm was glimmering in the faint light, stretched out towards her, fingers twitching gently as if trying to close the distance of a good thirty feet. 

“What does it do to you to hear him say your name?” Yelena asked, both fascination and disgust in her voice. “You’ll never remember him, you know that, right? Your brain was rewired completely. Not like his, which was so scrambled, nothing’s ever going to stick for real.” 

She crouched down before Natasha and tilted her head. Her voice was almost gentle. 

“So I wonder. What is it you’re thinking when you look at him?” 

Natasha took a deep breath and braced herself, every muscle in her body tight to the point that she felt like she was shaking. She held Yelena’s gaze, but her focus was at the periphery of her vision, on the soft gleam of metal that came closer and closer.

Her outstretched fingers closed around the small silver ball that Barnes had pushed her way. 

She swallowed and her thumb felt for and pressed down on the small button.

“Think fast,” she whispered, tossing the ball at Yelena and kicking her away from herself with all the force she could muster before scrambling to her feet and running towards Barnes’ motionless body on the floor. 

She could see Clint stumble out of the Praying Mantis, and had only time to yell “DOWN!” at him before she threw herself down on Barnes. As they rolled on the ground with the force of her landing, she felt his metal arm come up to coil around her head protectively. 

The shockwave of the explosion rolled over them, and Natasha could hear the splash of a body hitting the water before she blinked past the shield of Barnes’s arm covering her face. 

Where Yelena Belova had stood, there was nothing but a small crater in the ground. 

A second later, the Praying Mantis gave an angry, heaving cough before it collapsed in on itself, bricks raining down on bricks, and windows shattering loudly with the wave of fire that forced its way outward. 

“NO!” Natasha screamed, thinking of Jess and the old woman who were still inside, who might not have left in time...

“Natasha,” Barnes said quietly, face torn with pain and hand clasping at the knife buried at his hip joint. His other leg was twitching, but he seemed unable to move now. Natasha pried his fingers away to look at the damage, but her gaze kept floating back to the building, where Clint was already yelling Jess’ name. 

“I’m sorry,” she said to Barnes, and got to her feet, half crawling towards the first piles of rubble. 

“Jess!” 

It couldn’t be, she couldn’t still have been inside... 

“Jess!” she yelled again, trying to pull herself up on the side of what seemed like a mountain of concrete. Clint was already busy moving rocks as heavy as he could lift them, peeking under collapsed beams and calling Jess’ name frantically.

Natasha heard faint coughing before she saw Jess dig herself out from under a pile of wooden beams and bricks, face twisted in pain underneath a thick layer of ash and dust. 

“ _Jess!_ ” 

“Flying,” Jess coughed, trying to wipe the hair that was caked to her forehead with blood to the side. She looked at Natasha, then at Clint, who was falling over himself to get to them. “Flying’s a superpower I’d like to have.” 

Natasha broke out a dry laugh that turned into a sob, and her eyes, burning with the heat and ash and dust in the air, started to water when she reached Jess and pulled her into a hug. She could feel Jess sniffle against her shoulder as she hugged her back.

“Is that you crying for me?” Clint’s voice was audible through the thick air, and Jess coughed out a laugh, wiping her face and grimacing at the tears in his eyes when she let go of Natasha to turn to Clint.

“Who’s crying here, asshole?” she asked, and Clint didn’t care to argue the point as he wrapped his arms around her and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. 

“I was practically out of the place when it came down,” Jess’s voice was muffled against his chest. “The Kudrin woman wasn’t so lucky.” 

Clint let her go and Jess looked tired and defeated. 

“I’m sorry. I saw a shard of glass slit her throat when the window blew. I-” 

“You got out. That’s all that counts,” Natasha said, forcing herself to take deep breaths when Clint pulled her upright without letting her out of his hug. “We all got out.”


	12. Who we were before

“Ready to go _home_ , is it?” Natasha replied to Jess’ question and Jess rolled her eyes, her smile only a little chagrined when she leaned back against the balcony rail and looked across the small, sleepy town in Eastern Finland that had been their hidey hole for the past week. 

“I gotta go somewhere,” she said, and below them, Clint was slamming the trunk to their newly stolen car shut. “Doesn’t make me an Avenger yet.” 

“No, I know,” Natasha said, sitting up in her chair carefully as to not disturb the dressing on her gunshot wound, which took its sweet time healing after it had gotten infected in the aftermath of the explosion. She leaned onto one of the armrests and reached out for the bottle of water on the nearby table. “I meant it when I said I wasn’t going to recruit you. I just want to know what your plan is.”

“I think I’d like to become a citizen,” Jess said quietly, picking at a scab on the back of her hand. “Of anywhere, really. I don’t technically belong to any country. Which sucks if you want to do things that require a passport.” She smirked. “Like maybe going back to Russia to clear some remaining HYDRA bases.” 

“I’m sorry; I promised to help you more than I did, in the end,” Natasha said ruefully, and Jess shrugged. 

“I didn’t find anything before I met you. But there was some stuff on my father in Latveria. I’m glad it’s gone.” It was the first time she spoke of whatever files she’d been digging into in the Latverian compound, and there was something dead in her voice that made Natasha’s heart ache for her. Jess forced a smile onto her face, as if to shake off the thought. 

“At least I know people with connections now who owe me, or so Clint says.” 

“Whatever you need, Clint will make it work,” Natasha agreed, taking a large sip of water. “And if not Clint, then Tony, or Vision. Vision could probably make you a citizen of any country you want with the most waterproof documents anyone’s ever seen.” She smirked. “But, you know, they will try to make you stay.” 

“Well, let them try,” Jess said lightly, but there was a tension in her jaw, so Natasha let the matter lie. 

It was quiet for a while, and Natasha leaned her face towards the sun that was coming through the clouds every now and then. 

“You’re not coming with us?” Jess finally asked when Clint yelled up at them that it was time to leave, and Natasha didn’t make a move to get up out of her chair. 

She shook her head. 

“Something I gotta do first.” 

“You know, I’m not sure that this was cryptic enough yet; maybe you should rest up for another two days,” Jess said, stepping back into their small apartment to get her bag. 

When she came back out, Clint was with her, and Natasha had gotten to her feet. She took the phone that Clint held out to her. It was a police internal report. 

“They found the old woman’s body under the rocks,” Clint said, his voice grim. He’d placed an anonymous tip with the police on their way out of the country, and had been monitoring their system ever since. “But the search in the river was a bust.” 

“Maybe there was nothing left to find,” Jess threw in, but she looked sceptical. “You did toss an explosive at her.” 

Natasha skimmed the police report, then handed the phone back to Clint and shook her head. 

“I don’t believe it. I mean yes, if you’re right, then we caught a break, and I’m not complaining.”

“But you don’t believe it,” Clint finished for her, sounding resigned. 

“I don’t think she’d be that easy to kill,” Natasha said. “And from what I can tell, Barnes doesn’t think so, either. It was his explosive, he should have a pretty good idea of what it can do.” 

Clint sighed and shoved his phone into his pocket, leaning against the frame of the balcony door. Jess gave him a nudge and pointed at her wrist, as if to tap an imaginary watch. 

“I know, we have to leave,” he said, moving to hug Natasha gently. “Don’t do anything stupid.” 

“You know me.” 

“I do, which is why we’re all bandaged up to our ears right now.” 

“Please,” Natasha teased. “One collapsing building and a bike chase. It was barely an adventure.” 

“Three collapsing buildings and at least two international almost-incidents involving the fugitive of the year,” Clint corrected dryly, dangling his car keys from one finger, while Jess and Natasha hugged goodbye. “No amount of bike chases will make good on that.”

“You think he’s coming back?” Jess asked suddenly, frowning at the city around them. Barnes had gone AWOL the night before, when Jess and Clint had begun to plan their departure, and they hadn’t heard from him since. 

“Well if he does I’ll give him your number and hug him goodbye from you,” Natasha smirked, and Jess stuck her tongue out at her. 

“I just wouldn’t want him to go die in a ditch after we stitched him together again,” she groused, not really meaning a word of it, and shouldering her bag again. “Ungrateful dick.” 

Clint chuckled, and Natasha walked them inside and through the small apartment to the door. 

“I’ll join you in about a week,” she said, and then, not quite knowing how to say it, held Jess back by the elbow and looked from her to Clint and back. “You know that no-one can know about Barnes. Especially not...” She corrected herself. “No-one. This really has to stay between us, all of it.” 

Jess nodded curtly. There was an official story of what they’d been doing, of course. They had hatched out the details the night before, and neither Barnes, Yelena nor Lyudmila were part of the narrative. Neither were their trips into Avengers-hostile territory, or the fact that Natasha was not in fact, the last remnant of the Red Room out there. That there were twenty-six unknown women out in the world, a corps de ballet of Black Widows, and Yelena Belova, who was without a doubt going to find them all.

“I know.” Jess’ voice turned lighter. “I don’t think I even know half of what I’m not supposed to talk about, but yeah, you have my word.” 

“I lie to good people all the time,” Clint said, grinning at them endearingly, then leaned over to kiss Natasha on the forehead when she glared at him. “As if anyone would believe me that my dashing young self once landed a hot lady super assassin twice my age...” 

“You’re such an asshat,” Natasha groaned, but by the way he squeezed her hand he promised her everything she needed him to. 

 

It had taken her longer than expected to get there, and she was glad to lean against the cold rock of the mountain when she lowered herself into a crouch and pulled the knotted handkerchief out of her bag. 

With a soft sound, like pearls falling and dancing across the floor, the small white teeth poured back into the shallow hole in the ground, and Natasha sat back on her heels after sealing them up with a rock. Her hand was pressed against the carved wall, and she let her gaze wander across the hundreds of initials forever etched into the side of the Kazakh mountains. 

A second later, her phone buzzed, and a message from Tony appeared on her screen. 

_Heads up, cap knows_ , the message said, followed by a worried frowny face and a link to a Russian newspaper website. 

Natasha swallowed hard, her throat suddenly tight. 

The webpage showed her own face, an old shot from her hearing on Capitol Hill after SHIELD had gone down. _Black Widow violates Russia’s anti-Avengers policy?_ the headline read, and Natasha’s eyes darted down the page as she scrolled further, suddenly feeling the chill of the mountain air. The paper cited an anonymous eyewitness and bullet caps found among the rubble of the Praying Mantis. _The Avengers could not yet be reached for comment. Whereabouts of the Black Widow are currently unknown_. 

Natasha closed the article and exhaled a long, shaky breath. 

_Thanks_ , she texted back at Tony, then put her phone away and stared at the stone in front of her. Her head felt suddenly very loud and very empty all at the same time. 

Her eyes darted from carved heart to carved heart, and finally, among the many names, Natasha spotted one with only one set of initials, dated 1972: N.A.R. 

_Natalia Alianovna Romanova_. 

There was something final and ultimately calming about the hastily scratched lines. This was where she had decided to die, the woman Natasha had never known. 

Tracing the outline with her hand, she got back to her feet, beating imaginary dust off her backside with her other hand. It was quiet around her, save for the wind that wrapped itself around the formations of rock with low whistles, carrying the scent of flowers and earth. 

Natasha closed her eyes for a long minute, before taking a step back and turning to look behind her. 

He stood at a small distance, watching her quietly, his body perfectly still, and his face half hidden behind the strands of hair that were moving with the breeze. 

It wasn’t a memory, she knew, but there was a sense of deja vu in the air, and she felt as if this moment was a fixed moment in time repeating itself. In another life, they were meeting in this place forever. 

“I have stood here before,” he said when she walked up to him across the meadow of flowers. He sounded bitter. “I was carrying her, and she smelled of smoke and fire.” 

“We saved a life that night,” Natasha said, trying to catch his gaze. His eyes were hard and his jaw was clenched. 

“Maybe we shouldn’t have,” he said through gritted teeth, looking past Natasha at the wall of rock, and she wasn’t sure then, if he was thinking of the nine-year-old or the grown woman. “If we had let her die...”

“We wouldn’t be here now,” Natasha caught his sentence off, and for a split second he looked angry. She pulled out her phone and showed him the article. 

“You’re being framed. You didn’t fire a single shot in that building, and she is still out there,” his voice turned dry and he swallowed furiously. “So what’s been gained by saving her life? It’s all been for nothing.” 

“No, it hasn’t,” Natasha disagreed, trying not to think of how much it felt like he was right. “It’s not for nothing to find out the truth.” 

It sounded empty in her own ears, and he looked at her with bitter disappointment in his face. 

“You sound like he does.” He clenched his jaw. “But we are not avenged.” Then he added, almost inaudibly. “I am no less broken than before.”

“Turns out you’re also not so much more broken than the rest of us,” Natasha replied, smiling a little despite the hollow feeling in her gut. “Even though not all of us remember.” 

“Does that make it easier?” he asked quietly. “Not remembering it.”

“Maybe,” Natasha replied, reaching out to wrap her fingers around his, which were unconsciously picking at the hem of his jacket. His hand relaxed. “But maybe remembering the good things makes it easier to know about all the bad ones.” 

“I remember her,” he said, moving his fingers lightly against hers. “The other you.” 

The one she’d never remember. The one who’d loved him. Natasha smiled bitterly, then brought up his hand and pressed it to his chest with both of hers. 

“Do me a favour?” she asked, squeezing with her fingers. “Keep her safe for me? I think... I like knowing that she’s remembered by someone.” 

He nodded and swallowed around a knot in his throat. 

“I wish...” he said, looking down at their hands. “I wish someone remembered me.” 

“Someone does,” Natasha smiled gently up at him. “You just haven’t remembered him yet.” 

His laugh was harsh and mirthless. 

“I’m actually terrified of it. What he remembers... that man doesn’t exist.” 

“He’s not what you’ll remember, either, though,” Natasha pointed out. “But the man you were once, he’s safe with him. He’ll remember him for you.” 

Barnes didn’t reply, and Natasha let go of his hand, rummaging in the pocket of her jacket. 

“And I,” she began, grabbing his hand again, palm facing upwards. “I’ll remember who you are now. Maybe that’ll be worth something someday.” 

His fingers curled around the small black commlink, the letter delta engraved in its side. He turned it over, then frowned at her.

“This is yours and Clint’s.” 

“We have a spare one at home,” Natasha said, closing his fingers around the comm. “We retired them ages ago, but if you ever find that you need a friend...” 

“I...” he started, but the rest of the sentence was lost. He nodded mutely and shoved it into one of the pockets in his jacket. 

Natasha’s phone vibrated again, and she pulled it out to see Steve’s face next to a new message. 

_10 mins out_. 

There was no smile attached, and Natasha felt the sting of it when she put her phone away. The weight of her betrayal descended on her shoulders, and she didn’t quite know how she would face him. 

“I can’t come with you,” Barnes suddenly said, and Natasha blinked up at him. There was guilt in his eyes, and a glimmer of defensive spite. She thought, for a moment, that if she brought him in now, Steve would forgive her breach of his trust. 

He’d forgive her for going to Latveria.

Hell, he’d forgive even the threat of a war with Russia. 

It was a tempting and terrifying thing to know about the most righteous man she’d ever met.

“I know that,” she smiled sadly up at Barnes, and she meant it. “I’m not asking you to.” 

He inhaled sharply and Natasha pulled him into a light hug. His metal arm combed through her hair and she could hear him breathe a thank you into her ear. She was sure that there would be a time when someone would bring Barnes in from the cold, but it wasn’t now, and it wasn’t her, and none of them were ready for it. 

“I should go now,” she said when they moved apart, checking the time and glancing into the direction they’d come from. Beside their car, the old building still stood derelict; the last memento to the facility that had been both her making and her undoing. 

She turned to look at Barnes.

“You can’t show up on the radar, so-”

“I know.” Barnes nodded and turned to look at the mountainside. “I won’t.” 

She watched him retreat into the mountain range and was about to start her own descent, when she turned around. He was almost out of earshot.

“Hey Barnes!” He stopped and turned, and Natasha couldn’t help a smirk. “You know, maybe one day we’ll find out who’d win when we’re both on top of our game.” 

She could see rather than hear his laugh when he turned around again, calling back over his shoulder.

“I’ll be there.”

**Author's Note:**

> Spoiler tags include: past Natasha Romanov/James "Bucky" Barnes
> 
> Thanks go to [nerakrose](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nerakrose) for the beta and the concrit. Apologies to Amorphis for ripping off their songs for half of my chapter titles. House of Sleep is the inofficial theme song to this entire story.


End file.
